The Rosewood Casket

by Sharyn McCrumb

  The others had gone to bed, but Clayt couldn’t sleep. He was still sitting in the circle of light cast by the brass table lamp, rereading his father’s scrawled testament, as if it would rearrange itself if he stared at it long enough. What a fool thing he was asking of them: to be cooped up together, building a coffin, for well nigh onto a week, when he knew full well the four of them hadn’t done much more than pass the time of day since they were teenagers.

  “Are you really Daniel Boone?” said a tiny voice from the hall doorway.

  In spite of himself, Clayt nearly jumped a foot, and his heart pounded through his sweatshirt like a trip-hammer. A little girl in a long white nightgown stood in the doorway, watching him with old and solemn eyes. Her fair hair was tousled from sleep, and she was clutching a stuffed animal in her arms. Then he remembered this was the daughter of Charlie’s girlfriend. He couldn’t recall her name.

  “What are you doing up, little one?” he asked her, keeping his voice low. “Don’t you know it’s past midnight?”

  She came forward, not as shy as he expected a small child to be, and peered up into his face. “Are you Daniel Boone?”

  “Oh, you must have heard the grown-ups talking about me this afternoon.” Clayt patted the sofa cushion beside him, motioning for her to sit down. “Well, no, the truth is I am not Daniel Boone. Old Daniel has been dead since 1820—that’s about a hundred and seventy-five years. I just pretend to be him sometimes, with a costume and all.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, because he used to live around these parts, and he loved the land, same as I do. He was the most famous pioneer there ever was. And because I think children here should learn about him when they’re young, so when they hear all that hillbilly nonsense about mountain people later in life, they’ll have words inside themselves to fight it with.” He was talking more to himself than to her. Then he smiled. “You know, you standing there with that stuffed camel in your arms puts me in mind of a Daniel Boone story right now.”

  She perched on the edge of the sofa, and looked up at him with solemn gray eyes, too old for her face. “Okay. Tell me.”

  “Now this story happened when Daniel was a young man, not yet twenty, living over in North Carolina near the forks of the Yadkin River. He was courting Miss Rebecca Bryan in those days, and one night he went out hunting in the woods with her father, Mr. Jim Bryan, who had a log cabin and a little farm there on the river. They were going out hunting painters—mountain lions, you’d probably call them.”

  The child nodded. “I seen pictures.”

  “The mountain lions were bold that year, carrying off a newborn calf or a lamb, without a by-your-leave. And they hunted at night.

  “So Daniel and Mr. Jim Bryan got their long rifles and a pan of hot, glowing wood coals, and they went out hunting painters. Now the reason for the wood coals was this: a cat’s eyes will glow in the dark if there’s the least little bit of light to be reflected in them. So the hunters would hold up those glowing coals, and the light would shine in the mountain lion’s eyes, and then the hunter would shoot—bang!—right between those two glowing circles of eyes, and he’d kill that lion.

  “Well, they bagged quite a few that night, and they were headed home in the dark, with the big cats’ bodies slung across the packhorse for skinning later, when they got almost back to the cabin, and here was another pair of green eyes shining up ahead of them in the trees. Before you could say ‘painter,’ Daniel Boone had slung that rifle up on his shoulder, and blam! He shot right straight at those glowing eyes.

  “And then he heard the crying. He and Mr. Bryan went running through the thickets, following the sound of that crying, and what do you think they found?”

  Kayla shook her head. She was hugging the toy camel as she listened. Clayt reached out and touched the furry head of the toy. “You holding your friend there is what reminded me of the story,” he told her. “What Daniel found in the clearing was pretty, dark-haired Rebecca Bryan herself, hugging the dead body of her pet kitten, but she wasn’t hurt at all, thank goodness. Daniel would have taken it hard if he’d harmed Rebecca, because he was already thinking about making her his wife. What he shot wasn’t a mountain lion at all, you see. Just a little old house cat, with its eyes shining in the darkness.

  “Rebecca cried all the way home, and Daniel had to do a lot of apologizing to get himself out of that mess. But I guess he got her to forgive him, because not two years later, she did marry Daniel, and the two of them had a lot of children and a lot of adventures in the fifty-seven years they were together.”

  “Is that long?” asked the girl.

  “I bet it could seem so,” said Clayt. “But I like to think they were happy.” He smiled at her solemn expression. “Now, miss, I’ve answered a passel of your questions, and told you a bedtime story to boot, so the least you owe me is a ready answer to a question of mine. How come you to be up at this hour? Mountain lion under the bed?”

  She laughed, and shook her head.

  “You’re not scared, are you, sleeping in a strange house?”

  “Nope. I’m not particular where I sleep. Why? Is this place haunted?”

  Clayt shrugged. “When we were real little, my brother Dwayne used to swear he saw a little girl walking around upstairs sometimes, but I don’t think I ever believed him. Until tonight,” he said, smiling. “You’re not her, are you?”

  “No, ’cause ghosts don’t eat, and I’m hungry.”

  Clayt hesitated. Storytelling was the extent of his child care skills. “You want me to get your mamma for you?”

  “She’s asleep with Charlie, and their door is locked. I’m not supposed to wake ’em up. Can’t you fix food?”

  “Well—I guess I could.” Clayt roused himself from the sofa, stifling a yawn and stretching. “If you’re not too awful hard to please. I might even join you. What’d you say your name was, again?”

  “Kayla Louise Johnson. And if you’re not Daniel Boone, what do I call you?”

  “Why, I reckon I’m your Uncle Clayt, Miss Johnson. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  “And that’s your job? Playact being Daniel Boone?”

  He escorted her to the kitchen. “Oh, I do a lot of things. I can guide a raft through the white water of the Nolichucky River, and I can tell birds from the sound they make, and I can track a deer through the woods and take his picture without him ever knowing I’m there. I guess if Daniel Boone were around these days, he’d be doing pretty much what I’m doing. Trying to keep out of a necktie and an office.”

  “How come y’all don’t sing with Charlie?”

  “Well, sometimes we do. Or we used to. Sitting around on the porch of an evening.”

  Kayla shook her head. “No. I mean like the Statler Brothers. I met them. They sing together for a living.”

  “Well, Kayla, I’ll tell you: Charlie is the best guitar player in the family, but that’s not all there is to it. The truth is that he’s the only one who could put up with being famous. The rest of us either don’t care to work that hard, or we don’t have the charm to travel all the time and smile at strangers day in and day out. Not even for Charlie’s money.”

  The kitchen was lit by a bare bulb suspended from the ceiling on a thick wire. Clayt groped for it in the darkness and switched it on. “You’re not scared of the dark,” he said approvingly to the child.

  “No. Mama likes me to be brave about things, so I put up with them, and pretty soon they don’t bother me anymore. Is there any milk?”

  “I got a quart, for folks to put in coffee, but I don’t suppose anybody’d object to you finishing it off.” He took the carton out of the refrigerator and set it on the table in front of her. “The clean glasses are over there in the dish drainer. Get you one. Now, what would you like to go with that? Peanut butter sandwich? Cookies?”

  “Cheese eggs,” said Kayla, pouring the milk with intense concentration and great care.

  Clayt stared at her. “Say what?”

&
nbsp; “I guess cooking isn’t one of your many jobs, Clayt.” He noticed that she had omitted the word “uncle.” Come to think of it, she didn’t call Charlie “uncle” either. Clayt wondered if Kayla and her mother would become a permanent addition to the family or if this was just another one of Charles Martin’s phases. “You take some eggs and put ’em in a frying pan with butter,” Kayla was saying. “And you grate some cheese. White cheese is the best, but any old kind will work. And you stir them up together until the cheese melts and the eggs stop being runny. It’s not hard. I can do the stirring, but I’m not allowed to mess with the stove.”

  “Butter, cheese, and eggs. Okay. What about milk?”

  Kayla shook her head. “Not unless you’re short on money, and the eggs have to last you till payday. Then you add milk to make them go farther. If you’re really strapped, you can use powdered milk, but that tastes yucky. We haven’t had to do that in a long time.” Kayla added kindly, “I can eat it, though, if that’s all there is.”

  “No, ma’am,” said Clayt, keeping his voice expressionless. He hauled the gray egg carton out of the refrigerator. “You can have all the eggs and cheese you want, cooked to your specifications.” He would give her the whole half dozen, and drive to the convenience store when it opened at six to restock the larder for the family’s breakfast.

  * * *

  Frank Whitescarver’s wife called his home office “the War Room” because it reminded her of Churchill’s headquarters in World War II, which she had seen once on a five-day tour of London. The trip to Europe had been organized by a local travel agent, and she went with three retired schoolteachers and a couple of lawyers’ wives, whose husbands couldn’t take time off to go, either. When she got back, every dish in the house was dirty, and the bedroom was ankle-deep in newspapers, but Frank had sold four houses and a tract of timbered mountain land to some couple who wanted a nice site for a retirement home. “You spend it, Betty Lou, and I’ll keep on making it,” he would tell her, smiling.

  “The War Room,” Frank’s pine-paneled den, had an old kitchen table for a desk, a black-and-white television for watching football games, and a fax machine so that he could be in touch with anybody, anywhere, right from home. One whole wall of the compact basement room was covered with maps of the northeast Tennessee counties. They were survey maps, drawn on a large scale, with circular lines for hills and markings indicating every creek and farm pond, and every single road, even dirt ones that were hardly more than cow paths. Betty Lou couldn’t make much sense of them herself, and, truth to tell, she wasn’t all that interested, but Frank was captivated by them. He could spend hours staring at the little pushpins and squiggles on those maps, just the way some people could look out of a picture window at a beautiful view and never tire of it.

  “This is my territory, Squaw, and I have to keep watch over it,” he would tell her. He called her “squaw” sometimes when he was in a teasing mood, on account of her brown eyes and her sharp, angled cheekbones that supposedly came from a Cherokee great-grandmother, somewhere back in the family history.

  Frank had written all over those wall maps in his own special code. He claimed to know who owned every foot of land in Wake County, and most of Carter and Unicoi, besides. He knew where the best views were, and how deep the wells were from one farm to the next, and who had the best soil for growing tomatoes. He didn’t boast about knowing those things, though. He kept the information in reserve in case it should ever come in handy. The other part of his work, though it didn’t occur to most people, was to be around: visible, accessible, and friendly to the community as a whole. He went to the Little League games, never missed a men’s prayer breakfast, and had served a couple of terms on the board of county commissioners. Frank Whitescarver knew everybody.

  “I can dial a wrong number and still talk,” he would tell her, jutting his chin out, the way he always did when he bragged.

  Betty Lou often wished that she had Frank’s way with people, but that was past praying for, she reckoned. Oh, she was polite to all and sundry—never a harsh word from her lips to anybody—but she just never did seem to cotton to people as much as Frank did. He seemed to thrive on five straight nights of community meetings, topped by a Saturday morning trash pickup with the Ruritans. Just thinking about it made her tired. She didn’t mind people every now and again, but she was never sorry when they went away, either. Fortunately, Frank didn’t insist on her trying to be pup-friendly, like he was. Sometimes she even thought that’s why he married her—so that he could have a rest at home from all the grins and chitchat.

  She stood in the doorway, watching him poring over his maps. His bald head shone in the lamplight, and his glasses were slid clear down to his nostrils so that he could see the fine print next to the pushpins. “I’m going up to bed, Frank,” she said. “Can I get you anything before I go?” She pointed to the pile of papers on the floor near his desk. “A garbage bag?” But her voice was teasing.

  Frank looked up at the dark outline in the doorway and smiled back. “No, thank you, ma’am. I won’t be long here. I just needed to come up with a few more land prospects before the city folks commence their spring migration. I was thinking about some of those places up on the ridge near the national forest. It’s nice table land with good views. Good trees, too.”

  “Are any of those places for sale, Frank?”

  He smiled at her. “Why, Squaw, there’s not a foot of land in the entire world that’s not for sale, if you go about it right. I just have to do a little investigating and see what it’s going to take to shift those folks off some prime development land at a bargain price. I heard today that old man Stargill was taken to the hospital in Johnson City. I think I’ll drive up there tomorrow, and see if I can be of any help at all to his family.”

  Betty Lou Whitescarver frowned. She couldn’t remember if the Stargills were anyone she should know, or if any of them were in one of Frank’s many organizations. She wondered how he had heard about the illness in the family, but then, Frank always seemed to know the most peculiar things, often as not before everybody else found out about it. “Will you need me to go with you, Frank? Or send a cake?” She could not keep the reluctance out of her voice. “I have to get my hair done tomorrow afternoon. It’s my regular day. And then I thought I might go to the mall.”

  “Oh, don’t you worry,” said her husband, waving away her tentative offer. “You won’t have to go. This condolence call is in the nature of business. Why, I might just be an answer to prayer for Randall Stargill’s boys. Yes, sir. An answer to prayer.”

  * * *

  Randall Stargill, earthbound by tubes and glowing machinery, dreamed on. A young nurse, making the rounds of the third floor in the darkest hours of the night, looked in on him, checking his vital signs, and recording the results on the chart at the foot of the bed. He seemed to be holding steady again. A few hours earlier, there had been rapid fluctuations in the old man’s heartbeat, and a flock of white-coats gathered around his bedside, waiting to see if he would let go of life at last, and ready to drag him back if he tried. But when the crisis passed without their assistance, and without the patient ever awakening, the staff members drifted away to more urgent and promising patients.

  Word had got around among the nursing staff that this scraggly old man was the father of a famous country singer—not that such a thing would make any difference in his care, because in any case they would do the best they could for a patient, but more staffers than usual dropped by to have a look at him, and at the nurses station, they wondered aloud whether anybody famous from Nashville would turn up during visiting hours.

  The young nurse wondered if the poor old man knew where he was; if he could feel all the tubes intruding into his body; and if he minded all the effort being made to keep him alive for another useless day.

  He looked peaceful now, except for the occasional flutter of an eyelid, indicating whatever passes for dreams to the comatose. She stood looking down on him, feeling ne
ither pity nor sorrow, and thought to herself that, for all intents and purposes, the two of them were each alone in this bright, sterile room.

  * * *

  In the cool darkness of his hospital room Randall Stargill stirred under clean sheets and took flight again. It was autumn this time, and Randall was walking with a young woman on Shawnee Ridge. She was nearly his own height, and slender, with hair as dark as any Indian’s, but her eyes were a clear blue that looked right past you and into forever. He wasn’t thinking about that, though, because her lips were red and sweet, and she was holding his hand as if she were afraid that the wind would blow her off into the valley.

  She was pretty, graceful, and quiet, but the thing that Randall Stargill liked best about her was that he couldn’t make her laugh. He was smaller than the other boys in the high school, and a little smarter than most, so to keep tempers on an even keel, Randall had got into the habit of clowning, laughing away an opponent’s resentment, jesting his way past an A-plus. He was popular enough, but sometimes he wished his classmates would like him for himself, without his having to try so hard. She never laughed at him. She seemed to like him better when they would talk together about serious things.

  “You ever wonder what the hawk sees when he’s sailing up there?” he said, pointing to a brown speck among the clouds.

  “The valley down there, same as we’re seeing,” she said, smiling.

  “Yes, but we have to stay on this one ridge, while he gets to fly all around and look at things from every which way. You can do that from an airplane, you know.”

  “Guess you can, if you’re not too scared to look.”

  “I wouldn’t be scared! I want to go up in one of those planes. This summer when the fair comes back to Hamelin, I’m going to get one of the barnstormers to take me up in his biplane. And I don’t want any old tame ride, either. I want to see the kind of stunt flying those fellows did in the Great War.”