The Rosewood Casket

by Sharyn McCrumb

  Did you see anything?

  Nora shook her head.

  “It’s a sad thing to lose a child,” said Grandma Flossie.

  “Maybe Daddy and the dogs will bring her back safe.”

  “It’s past two days now,” said the old woman. She raised her hand for a solemn wave as the black truck seething with hounds eased its way past them. “Nights are cold out on the mountain in May.”

  “Are you telling the child about the lost youngun?” Nora’s mother stood at the screen door, frowning at the pair of them. “Now don’t go giving her nightmares! She’s moony enough as it is. She might think she’ll be taken off next.”

  “I’ll stay close,” Nora promised.

  Grandma Flossie turned to look at her daughter-in-law. “Nora will be all right,” she said.

  “Well, of course, she will,” said Nora’s mother. “She wouldn’t be fool enough to wander off in those woods. Besides, it isn’t as if Nora was a stray, like that poor youngun at Stargill’s, with her mother deserted by one man and dumped on his kinfolks’ doorstep by the next one. If it had been me, I’d have gone north with Ashe Stargill, babies or no, instead of having to eat humble pie on the farm with that mama of his. I know they didn’t take to Luray, but they had to accept her, on account of her having their grandson, and Ashe Stargill finally up and marrying her. But I can imagine how they feel about having the other one underfoot, with times as hard as they are now. I’m not casting blame, but I’ll bet there were sighs of relief when that girl youngun ran off. Probably knew she wasn’t wanted.”

  “Pray about it,” said Grandma Flossie, “but don’t scare this child here.” She nodded toward Nora, who was twisting her pinafore, and looking as if she might cry.

  When her mother was no longer a shadow in the doorway, Nora leaned over to her grandmother and whispered, “If those Stargills don’t want that little girl, do you think we could find her and take her in?”

  Flossie Bonesteel sighed. “I don’t think your mother would take kindly to that, Nora, but she may be right about things at the Stargill place. And the Lord knows best. Perhaps the child will be happier … this way.”

  Nora heard the sorrowful tone and felt cold in the May sunshine. “Reckon what happened to her, Grandma?”

  The old woman motioned for Nora to sit down beside her. She picked up another potato from the bucket and began to peel it as she talked. “I don’t rightly know,” she said softly. “But, I’ll tell you what: the Cherokees that used to live in these hills told stories about people who got lost on the mountain. They would wander away from their villages, and never be seen again. Cherokees said that some of these mountains are hollow underneath, and that a race of little people called the Nunnehi live inside—only instead of being a dark cave underground, the rocks give way to a bright, beautiful land where it is always high summer.”

  “What do the little people look like?”

  “I don’t know that anybody has ever seen one, and come back to tell the tale, but the Indians thought they looked like little bitty Cherokees: copper-skinned, with long black hair. I always fancied that they had pointy ears, and cat-eyes, and hair like crow feathers, black and shiny. I never wanted to meet one, though. They say that if you go off with the Nunnehi, and visit their beautiful land, you will never be happy on earth again. Especially if you eat any of their food, you can never come home. But if you leave the earth to go and live with the little people, you never grow old, either.”

  “I’m glad you never went off with those little people,” said Nora. “I’d sure miss you.”

  “Well, I reckon I might go one day,” said her grandmother. “They are said to be kind to those that mean no harm. Someday when my rheumatism gets too bad to stand, and my eyes get to where I can’t see my needle, and I get too tired to walk to meeting, I think I might just go calling on those little people, and stay awhile in that bright land of theirs. I’d like being young again in the summer of always. I reckon I’d miss you, too, Nora, but I wouldn’t want you grieving to see me go. They say that those who dwell with the little people are forever glad.”

  “Do you think the little girl in the woods is glad?”

  “Well, Nora, I think she is peaceful, and—and—that she will never be cold or hungry again. She will never grow old.” Tears glistened on the old woman’s cheeks. She brushed them away with the back of her hand, and went back to peeling potatoes.

  Nora wondered why her grandmother was sad if the little girl was in such a beautiful and happy place with the little people. What a blessing never to be cold or hungry again. She put the thought out of her mind. Even when the men returned after dark that evening, penning up the muddy, exhausted hounds without a word or a smile, and ate a cold supper in silence, she did not wonder.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Were there a voice in the trees of the forest, it would call on you to chase away these ruthless invaders who are laying it to waste.

  —SIMON GIRTY,

  white adoptee of the Shawnee,

  from John Bradford’s Historical Notes on Kentucky

  Even when he had no clients to chauffeur from one property to another, Frank Whitescarver spent a lot of time in his Jeep Cherokee, scouting the back roads of the county in search of suitable parcels of land. March was a good time for such expeditions. Dirt roads that had been rendered impassable by winter mud and ice were navigable again, and the still leafless trees provided a good view of the land and the vistas that could be seen from them. People these days seemed to care more about the land they could see from their property than they did about the property itself. In March the views were not blocked by foliage. March was not too bitterly cold for walks through the woods and along old logging trails to reach parcels without road frontage; and the snakes were not yet awake to prosecute trespassers into their domain.

  Whitescarver tried to do his scouting in early March, so that when spring fever hit the prospective buyers, he could be ready with a good selection of properties to offer. Every spring, about the time the dogwoods bloomed and the Blue Ridge Parkway became clogged with cars from Charlotte, Knoxville, Roanoke, and all points in between, the upwardly-mobile gentlefolk of east Tennessee would start picking up the real estate brochures from the racks at Krogers and at local restaurants. They would look longingly at poetic ads for mountain land (Deer for neighbors in your own wilderness paradise … 360-degree view! Commuting distance to Johnson City, to East Tennessee State!). And they would call.

  His real estate clients were mostly city people, although they would have said otherwise, and they all wanted the same thing, and would not get it, mainly because it was not available, but also because, Whitescarver knew, if he did provide them with what they asked for, they would hate it. “We want a little farm, Mr. Whitescarver,” he was told by slender blondes in earth-tone cashmere sweaters. Their faces bore an earnest glow as they spoke of the noise and confinement of suburban life, of wanting room for the children to play without fear of traffic or strangers. He supposed they had been raised watching The Waltons and Little House on the Prairie in centrally heated split-levels in Greensboro or Lexington, and they dreamed of such an idyllic existence without having the least idea what it was like to live on a farm.

  Their husbands, Professor This or Doctor That, would talk about land as a good investment, and mumble about wanting to do a little gardening. A subdivision did not fit their self-image: it diminished their status, lumped them into the herd of overachievers. They really wanted a fiefdom, a country estate that would proclaim their success by its very exclusiveness. Whitescarver would solemnly agree with all this piffle, and ferry them down muddy roads to a selection of brambled sites, overgrown with scrub pines because the mountain’s valuable timber was always harvested for the thousands of dollars profit it would bring before the land was put up for sale. The prospective pioneers would wonder why the woods looked so meager, but they wouldn’t ask the realtor, and he never told them.

  As the city couple hiked through
underbrush in search of the elusive view from the top—of more scrub pines—Whitescarver would affect his most genial country-boy drawl, while he advised his clients of the cost of running a paved road up the mountain so that one could get to work in winter. “Reckon you’ll need a four-wheel like mine,” he’d say with a chuckle. By the time he moved on to the hazards of well drilling, the expense of obtaining a power line, and the impossibility of getting cable television, the couple’s L.L. Bean topsiders were caked with brown mud, and they had ceased to enthuse about the glories of country life, and they directed most of their attention to the ground, watching for the rattlesnakes Frank had casually mentioned.

  Frank Whitescarver was an expert in gauging the exact psychological moment when the city couple had seen enough scrub land. Then they were ready to be taken to Boone’s Mountain, an upscale subdivision of brick homes in styles ranging from Tudor to contemporary, all situated on carefully landscaped five-acre lots, with views, city water and power, paved streets, and cable—all for a mere $250,000 and up. Twenty-seven houses artfully arranged on one mountaintop—owned and developed by Frank Whitescarver himself. There were no lovely mountaintops to be had for a thousand dollars an acre, because when such land went up for sale, Frank bought it himself, carved it up into five-acre lots, selling for thirty thousand dollars apiece, and had his construction firm put up two dozen houses. For an outlay of a hundred thousand dollars, he could expect a profit of close to a million.

  The would-be country gentry almost always found a house they liked at Boone’s Mountain or Deer Meadow or one of his other planned communities. Here were people like themselves, who drove the right cars and played golf and had upscale careers of their own—and they weren’t too close—five acres is a comfortable amount of living space between neighbors. By the time the husband said, “I suppose it isn’t a subdivision really,” it was time to produce the offer-to-purchase forms. The final deal clincher was Frank’s casual remark as he handed over his ballpoint pen, “And, one thing about living here, folks, nobody’s going to put a trailer up near your beautiful new home.” Frank knew that trailer park was Yuppie-speak for leper colony. The gambit seldom failed him.

  He parked his Jeep close to the ditch on an old logging trail, and got out to inspect the land. He saw a flock of Canada geese winging their way past the treetops, a sure sign of spring. The migrations had begun. Soon the subdivision people would catch a whiff of spring and begin their own migrations, and he would be ready.

  He had lived in east Tennessee all his life, so he knew most of the old families: who was likely to sell, and who might be forced to sell by the death of a parent or because of financial hardship. He kept a close eye on the courthouse records, too. You never knew what might turn up. He would be needing some new land soon. It was time for the old pioneers to move on and make way for the new.

  * * *

  “You’ve never talked much about your family,” said Kelley.

  Charles Martin Stargill shrugged. “I wouldn’t call us close,” he said. He flipped off the radio, much to Kelley’s relief. He always tuned it to a country station, and if they didn’t play his record within a half hour, or if they played certain other people’s records, Charles Martin would begin to tense up, and he’d frown, and sometimes forget to answer her when she asked him something. Sometimes, too, he drove to the tempo of the music, which terrified her, but she never complained about it, and she knew he wouldn’t let her drive. The sudden silence made her unclench her fists and take a deep breath. It was better to talk.

  They had decided that leaving at rush hour would have slowed them more than it was worth, and then Charles Martin got busy making phone calls, and rearranging things, so that it was past nine o’clock before he could approve Kelley’s packing. By then he was tired, so they went to bed, then got up at five so that they could get through Nashville before the morning commute got in gear.

  Kayla was asleep in the backseat, wrapped in an old quilt, and hugging Sally, the stuffed Steiff camel Charles Martin had brought her from a concert tour in Germany. She had fallen asleep just as they got on I-40 east in Nashville, lulled by the predawn darkness and the soft hum of the Lexus’s engine. Now the ride would be a peaceful one, and Kelley didn’t even want to stop for coffee for fear of waking the child.

  Kelley cast about for something else to say before Charles Martin noticed the silence and turned the radio back on. “But you got the guitar from your family.”

  He nodded. “The rosewood prewar Martin. I swear I think I was named for it.”

  The guitar was in its case in the backseat, on the floor behind the driver’s seat. Charles Martin always put it there, and he always warned Kayla not even to touch the case. Kelley didn’t like to touch it, either. She knew that the guitar was worth thousands of dollars, and that it had been in the Stargill family for more than fifty years, but that wasn’t what made her leery of the instrument. That guitar was like a part of Charles Martin, as if they were connected somehow, the way she’d heard that twins sometimes share feelings between them. He always knew where it was, and sometimes he’d take it out and rub the strings with a chamois cloth, as he was talking or watching television, stroking it as if it were a dog. She wasn’t surprised that Charles Martin had brought the guitar with him, even if he had ho intention of playing a note while he was at the homeplace. If he left Nashville for more than a day, the rosewood Martin went with him. Nobody else was even allowed to touch the case.

  “Was it your father’s guitar?” she asked.

  “My grandmother’s. His mother. They say it skips a generation. People used to say that I got my musical ability from her. Daddy said that she knew all the old ballads, and that she could play just about any instrument she picked up, without ever having a music lesson, or knowing how to read a note.”

  “Was she a country singer, too?”

  “No. The Carter family was a rarity back then. Mountain women generally didn’t get careers in show business. The story is that she had a homemade guitar that sounded like two cats in heat, and my grandaddy gave her the Martin for a Christmas present one year, with money he earned on his logging job in Carter County. Or maybe he won it at poker in the logging camp. She gave it to me when I was four, because I was the only one of the younguns that could carry a tune. And she never did sing any more by then. Daddy said she quit a long time before I was born.”

  “You’ve had that guitar since you were four?” There wasn’t a scratch on the gleaming rosewood, and the fretwork looked new.

  “Not to play,” he said. “Mommy put it up for me until I got older, for which I am eternally grateful to her, though they tell me I pitched a fit about it at the time. Thank goodness she didn’t take the strings off, or put it in a trunk in the attic. She didn’t even know it was worth anything, but she took care of it because it was a family treasure. Isn’t it funny? I bet that guitar is worth more than Daddy’s farm.”

  * * *

  Clayt spent the night up at the farm, sleeping in his clothes on the sofa because he didn’t have the energy to clean up an upstairs bedroom. It was probably knee deep in dust up there. Besides, he thought that one of his brothers would arrive any minute, and he wanted to be sure he heard their knocking so he could let them in. He half expected the hospital to call with news of his father’s passing, but when he opened his eyes to the gray light of early morning, all was still quiet.

  He put on a pot of coffee, hurrying to the front window every time he heard a car go by, but he ended up drinking three cups by himself, and pouring the rest down the sink. They hadn’t tried to drive straight through, then. He took a shower before he remembered that he had brought no clean clothes to change into. His father’s clothes were too small for him, but he took a clean pair of socks, and left his dirty ones in the hamper. He would have to go back to Jonesborough anyhow, though, because he had a school program that afternoon, and he needed his costume. He called the hospital, and was told that there was no change in Randall Stargill’s con
dition.

  “I’ll be by later in the morning,” Clayt told the nurse.

  When Robert and Lilah reached the house at eleven, they found a note taped to the front door. “Come on in,” it said. “Daddy is in the hospital, and I’ve gone to do a school program on Daniel Boone. Be back as soon as I can.—Clayt.”

  * * *

  A semicircle of third graders looked up at the frontiersman with expressions that ranged from wariness to open delight. Hands waved in the air before he even began to speak, but their pretty young teacher shushed them and said that the visitor would answer questions when he finished.

  “Hello, I’m Daniel Boone,” said Clayt, leaning down to shake hands with a boy and a girl in the front row. “You’re probably wondering how come I’m not wearing a coonskin cap, like you’ve seen in the movies. Well, the fact is, I never did wear one of those things. I considered myself a frontier gentleman. This hat I’m wearing is a Quaker-style beaver hat, like the kind folks wore when I was growing up—in Quaker Pennsylvania. This buckskin shirt and the leggings and moccasins are my frontier outfit, good clothes to hunt in. I usually carry a big knife in my belt, but Mrs. Sampson here didn’t think the principal would care too much for that.” He made a sad face. “She wouldn’t let me bring my long rifle, either.”