As for Hank Blackshear, he was just a skinny little third grader who grinned a lot and didn’t have much to say except to critters, which he loved. His daddy was the town vet, and Hank seemed to know that someday he’d take over that legacy, just like I’d take over my mama’s. Hank was sweet and friendly and acted like a pet puppy around me and Robbie. It makes no sense to explain how the three of us got to be good friends, since Hank was four years younger than me and Robbie, and I was a girl with intentions on Robbie—not that he noticed. Hormones and teenage smugness hadn’t set in yet, so we all got along.
Robbie crooked a finger at me, then pointed in the general direction of the high school. Elephant, he mouthed.
I swung around toward Mama. “The elephant’s here! The carnival’s started! See you later, Mama!”
She sighed with relief and waved a hot curler at me. “Don’t eat too much junk food. Be back by lunchtime. Here.” She scooped a handful of change from her tip jar.
“If it was me going, I wouldn’t get within a mile of a nasty elephant,” grumbled Wanda Halfacre, Mama’s assistant. The Halfacres lived out in the wilds of Chinaberry Mountain, and they were Cherokee Indian. Wanda had inky black hair cut in a shag and a tiny gold feather charm in one ear lobe. She wore only cotton shirts and tie-dyed jeans, leather sandals—even in toe-freezin’ cold weather— and turquoise Indian jewelry. She took herbal pills and said she was all natural. “It’s not right, an elephant in these mountains,” Wanda went on, and pursed her cherry-red mouth. “Not natural.” She squirted some more perm solution on a lady’s hair.
If Wanda set Mama to thinking, I might be forbidden to go. “I like odd critters,” I announced quickly. “Odd critters and odd people that are so ugly you can’t hardly look away and so you want to fix ‘em up to look prettier.”
Every woman in the shop stared at me. “Like, uh, elephants,” I tried to amend. My voice trailed off.
Mama looked at me as if she could, right then, snip me off at the roots.
“Bye,” I yelped. I hurried outside, pulling a pink jacket over my embroidered pink sweater and fake-designer jeans, hugging a macrame purse full of Mama’s tip money to my side. I glared down at Hank, who chortled like a third-grade monkey, then up at Robbie, who bit back a wicked, pre-teenage smile.
I punched both boys on their shoulders. “Shut up. Let’s go see the elephant.”
When you’re twelve-years-old, life seems simple. That was the last day it ever would be.
* * * *
Mossy Creek High School was small and old and beautiful, and we all loved it. The next year Robbie and I would enter the eighth grade there, and we talked about our plans all the time. Our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents had gone to the high school. The school building dated back to the turn of the century, about when town hall and the jail were built, too.
All three had the same look—solid and friendly, made of big blocks of mountain stone with curved red-brick arches over the doors and the windows. The school’s main doors were a good fifteen feet tall. The floors were made of wide chestnut boards from before the blight wiped out all the big chestnuts in the mountains, and the inside walls were topped with fancy, curlicued cornices, like some kind of Greek temple. The state board of education had started making dark noises about the school needing upgrades on its pipes and electricity. But we knew who was really behind the complaints. Bigelowans.
“Those people down at the county seat in Bigelow won’t rest until they snatch our high school into the craw of great big modern Bigelow County High,” Wanda Halfacre always said. “They just can’t stomach the fact that we’ve got a naturally superior way of life up here.”
She was right about that. Hank, Robbie and I strolled along the grassy shoulder of East Mossy Creek Road, admiring the autumn trees and breathing in pure, cool air like a perfume. We had the confidence of kids who knew they’d one day graduate into the adult world as Mossy Creek High School Fighting Rams, continuing all our town’s best traditions.
The school was an easy, ten-minute walk down East Mossy Creek through a fringe of hemlock forest outside town, past the graveled lane to the town swimming hole and over a strong wooden bridge that crossed Mossy Creek’s right fork. Then the forest opened up into a broad, flat clearing with Mount Colchik in the background and the brightest blue sky overhead, and there stood Mossy Creek High. Big laurels and rhododendron shrubs and huge beech trees framed the old school. It was as wholesome as a fresh-fluffed bouffant.
The traveling carnival had set up in the big front parking lot and beneath the long metal awning of the drop-off bus lane. I whistled happily at the sight of the carnival’s whirring ferris wheel, clanking roller coasters, and gaudy game booths, all glowing with neon lights in the cool sunshine of that Saturday morning. The scent of grilling hamburgers and the hot, sizzling oil of funnel cakes wafted from concession stands, and old-fashioned carnival music, like a whacked-out steam calliope, blared from speakers somewhere. Cars and pickup trucks were parked all over, and several hundred Mossy Creekites were already crowding into the area.
“This is what heaven is like,” I said.
Hank screeched like a thrilled barn owl and nodded his agreement. But Robbie slowed to a walk and glared at me. “Don’t say that. It’s not heaven if my dad isn’t here. Ask my mother. She’s like me. We know there’s no heaven, anymore.”
“Robbie, I’m sorry,” I whispered.
His face went grim, and he looked away from our sympathy, then walked on. We sighed and followed him.
When the three of us rounded a hedge of tall laurel we stared at the scene in front of us and halted. Out on the school’s side lawn sat a big, life-sized concrete statue of a ram with his head down and his big, curling horns poised to slam into somebody. Nowadays he’d be judged violent and accused of promoting bad attitudes. Back then, we just thought he symbolized the pure truth: Mossy Creek’s slogan was “Ain’t goin’ no where, and don’t want to.”
I’ll butt anybody who tries to change that, the ram seemed to say.
“Look,” Robbie said suddenly.
Hank chirped like an upset squirrel. I gasped.
Every year for homecoming the senior class painted GO MOSSY CREEK RAMS BEAT BIGELOW WILDCATS on the statue’s side in green-and-white letters—our school colors. But this year, someone had snuck up during the night and painted some words about Mossy Creek I won’t repeat. The ram was R-Rated, at least.
A crowd of adults hunkered around the big statue, pointing angrily at the words and talking loudly about catching the Bigelow kids who’d written them. I saw Chief Battle Royden shaking his head while the school principal, Mr. Doolittle, wrung his hands and said, “Look for fingerprints, Chief.”
Just as we finished absorbing the whole eyeful of obscene anti-Mossy Creek slogans, a group of red-faced daddies flung a big blue tarp over the ram, and the school janitor spotted us. “The show’s over, you three,” called big, burly Lock MacNeil. “Pull in your eyeballs and keep movin’.”
We ducked back behind the laurel then headed for the carnival area, sputtering. Of course the dirty words were the work of fat-cat Bigelow Wildcats.
“Damn snotty Bigelowans,” Robbie said.
“Nasty Bigelowans,” I agreed. “Writing all that crap for little kids to see.” Irony and me weren’t on a first-name basis, yet.
Hank just looked at the tarp-covered ram, and growled.
* * * *
A sign said the elephant’s name was Rose. She was, well, yeah, an elephant. Smelled like one, looked like one, not much more to the description than that. She blinked slowly in the cool November sunshine, her skinny, gray, elephant tail switching a little. She wore a wide, red-leather harness around her neck and middle, with little bells on it. Hank walked right up to her, and she seemed to smile at him. He sure had a way with animals. Rose wrapped her long, snuffling trunk around his upstretched hand and shifted her feet like a dog glad to see him. Her bells tinkled. Her owner, a little-bitty old man
in a clown suit but not wearing any clown make-up, which made him look kind of weird, had chained her by one ankle to the bumper of his camper.
ROSE THE AMAZING WILD ELEPHANT, was painted on the camper’s white siding in big, overstuffed red letters.
“She looks about as wild as a dead possum in the middle of the road,” Robbie commented.
“Hush, she’s pretty.” I stared up at Rose. She was as tall as the school’s big front doors. I’d never seen anything big enough to make those doors look small, but Rose did it.
She looked happy enough with her life. She stood in a deep bed of straw, slurped from a galvanized wash tub full of fresh water, and patiently let a steady stream of kids feed her peanuts. “One dollar gets you a bag of peanuts for the wild pachyderm,” her owner sang out, as he reached up with a pole to scratch Rose between the eyes. “Two dollars gets you a photograph of yourself sittin’ on the back of the wild pachyderm.”
I swiftly fished two bucks in quarters from my macrame purse. “I’m gonna sit on the back of the wild pack-a-perm,” I declared.
Five minutes later, I was viewing the world from Rose’s broad shoulders. I clung to a leather handhold on her harness and grinned weakly down at Robbie and Hank. “Y’all get in the picture, too,” I ordered. “And if I fall off, y’all catch me.”
So they stepped close to Rose the elephant and posed solemnly, while a crowd of kids watched in awe. The half-made-up clown took our picture with an instant-snapshot camera. When I climbed down, the boys and I studied the photograph while it developed.
First we were shadows, and then we were real. We looked cocky and brave. All the other kids were jealous as hell.
“We’re the Three Musketeers,” I said.
Robbie smiled a little. “The Three Musketeers with their noble pack-a-perm.”
It was a great moment. We weren’t afraid of the elephant at all.
Let me tell you, we should have been.
* * * *
There was an ill buzz in the Creekites at the carnival; people were getting all worked up. “You know who I think wrote that filth on the statue?” I heard one mama say to another. “That Fang and Paw Club down at Bigelow High.”
“Fang and Claw,” the other mama corrected. “Fang and Claw Society. But the Fang and Claw died out years ago. Bigelow High got rid of it.”
“Mayrene, did your folks raise you to be an idiot? It’s a secret club. Always has been. Going all the way back to World War II. Secret. Rich boys pullin’ nasty pranks. In secret.”
Mayrene put her hands on her hips. “Betty, I know more about the Fang and Claw Society than you’ll ever know, you fool. My Judith Bea dated a Bigelow boy, and he said you can tell who’s in the society because they wear a fang and claw necklace. And he said nobody wears one, anymore.”
“Because they wear ‘em in secret. And don’t call me a fool!”
“Look, don’t you call me an idiot!”
“It’s idiots like you that make us an easy target for Bigelowans!”
“It’s fools like you who believe in secret boys’ clubs!”
The mamas lurched toward each other. Their families got between ‘em before any fisticuffs or hair-pulling could commence, then led them away in opposite directions. A big crowd of folks stood there gape-mouthed, watching. We didn’t see many mama-brawls in Mossy Creek.
“Lordawmighty,” I said under my breath. “Everybody’s goin’ crazy.”
Robbie stood in weighty silence, gazing into the sink-a-basket-and-win-a-basketball booth. Hank was tossing nickels inside a booth full of little goldfish bowls complete with fish. If he landed a nickel in a bowl, he got a fish. A goldfish was the only kind of pet he didn’t have at home. I wiped a wisp of cotton candy off my jacket and looked around curiously, hoping to hear more adults squabbling in the crowd.
Robbie shook his head. “That lady was right. Creekites are always an easy target for Bigelowans.”
“Aw, that’s just because we aren’t sly as snakes, like them. That’s what my grandma says.”
“We’ve got to show everybody Creekites can fight back.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. I’ll think of something.”
I nodded.
I should have left the carnival and dragged the boys with me. But I didn’t.
So our fate was sealed.
The Mossy Creek Gazette
215 Main Street • Mossy Creek, Georgia
From the Desk of Katie Bell, Business Manager
Dear Vick:
After the fire, we found elephant footprints all around the school, but no elephant. Rock Bottoms, our local brick mason—father of Mutt, Boo, and Sandy—made a large plaster cast of the elephant’s tracks. It was displayed at the post office for a year or so, like a wanted poster. Finally, Chief Royden donated it to Ripley’s Believe It Or Not museum down in Florida. Least that’s what he said. I think he just couldn’t stand the thought of the unsolved crime, anymore. Or the embarrassment.
Not many police chiefs couldn’t find an elephant.
You could say his boy, Amos, has been looking ever since.
Katie
AMOS
What is it about an unmarried man that makes everyone determined to see him tied up and accounted for by some woman? Or is it just that no one can resist a little romantic blarney on St. Patrick’s Day?
AMOS
A Date That Will Live in Infamy
I had to smile at Katie Bell’s indomitable spirit. Only an optimist would send out a survey asking for our deepest, darkest memories and expect us to return it to the town gossip columnist. It was certainly a clever way to stockpile column material for the next year. It would certainly be interesting reading. If anyone sent anything in. That wasn’t happening. At least not in my case. I admired Katie for trying to create this pamphlet of memories and sharing, but I didn’t think I’d be contributing. I knew better than to volunteer incriminating information.
Not that I had anything to do with the high school fire. Not me. I was holding down the bench for the football team. Coach always seemed worried about the possibility of the wind carrying it off, so he made sure I anchored it. I’ve always wondered if a seat in the bleachers would have been any less frustrating. I practiced like a maniac. Ran more laps, lifted more weights, waded my way through a labyrinth of tires, and took more practice hits than any other defensive end we’d ever had. I’d done every bit of it because I’d been too young to know that adults often leave words out of axioms.
When adults say, ‘If you work hard enough, you can be anything you want,’ they really mean—‘If you work hard enough, you can be almost anything you want.’
The secret Katie would like and I won’t voice is that when I look at the grass grown almost-over the old high school’s foundation, I see the loss of innocence. A million years ago when I was sixteen, I truly believed that if I kept showing up for practice . . . if I kept saying, ‘Yes, sir, Coach, I’m ready!’. . . if I held down that bench down long enough, I was going to get in the game. I’d have my chance to save the day and make the play. Before that high school burned down, I was going to be a hero. Battle was going clap me on the back and drag me into one of those too-proud-to-be-distant father-son hugs and say, ‘Damn, I’m proud of you!’
All I had to do was work hard. That’s what they kept telling me.
And still do.
But the high school burned, and I discovered that if you work hard enough, you can hang on until the Bigelow High School coach makes his last cut of senior try-outs. If you work hard enough, you can earn the coach’s respect and one of those silent hand-on-the-shoulder squeezes as he gives you the bad news, but working hard wasn’t enough to earn a spot on the team. Not on a team with the talent Bigelow had when they absorbed the Mossy Creek Rams.
When I look at where the high school used to be, I see one of those classic unfinished moments that defined my relationship with Battle. Sometimes you can’t have what you want. Sometimes what you want is
n’t something you can control. You pick yourself up. You learn. You realize that the experience is as important as the goal. If I hadn’t tried, if I hadn’t worked hard enough, I wouldn’t even have been sitting the bench. If I hadn’t been sitting the bench, I wouldn’t have had a front row seat when the lights went out in Georgia.
But I’m not sharing that with Katie Bell.
I’m not stupid, and as adorable as she is . . . she is the town gossip columnist.
* * * *
I’m not the only one around here who’s reluctant to talk about himself. Every man, woman and child in Mossy Creek imagines they have a secret. Some—a very small percentage of them—do manage to keep the embarrassing and damaging snippets of their lives tucked safely away in a bureau drawer, jewelry chest or their own mind. But for the majority of Mossy Creek, the notion of privacy is a figment of their imagination. An illusion.
In Mossy Creek, it’s a hard fact of life that ‘Latin’ and ‘Privacy’ are dead languages. No one speaks Latin, and no one understands Privacy.
If I didn’t think Ida’d take aim—possibly at me—I’d put up a sign at the edge of town as a warning: “Check your privacy at the door. Or we’ll check it for you.”
What’s my point?
I miss the subtle nuances of big city social behavior. I miss taking out my garbage without an audience. I miss going to the grocery in my favorite, almost-disintegrated Eagles’ ‘Hell Freezes Over’ t-shirt from ten years ago without Ida Hamilton Walker raising an eyebrow and inquiring as to whether my salary is adequate. When I was a cop down in Atlanta, women never questioned my Eagles shirt.
Reunion at Mossy Creek Page 5