River moved closer. “You saved yourself, Sis, and Jimmy. I shoulda’ known.” He sounded proud, which inspired a mixture of feelings in my chest. I’d never seen it that way. “So, what did y’all do with the body?”
I had never asked about the body and when Jimmy tried to tell me right after it happened, I hadn’t wanted to know. All I’d focused on then was that crazy idea about making a charm dark enough and magic enough to hide our secret. I used all my knowledge from the stories Momma and Daddy had told me over the years. I was too traumatized and just not wise enough at that age, to know that by including a tooth that Jimmy had knocked out of his dad’s mouth in the fight, I was essentially creating a box full of evidence against us and not a protective charm. I hadn’t even thought about asking when Jimmy had picked up that tooth off the rocks. The carved snake represented the one we saw that day, and the man with the noose, his dad. I was glad I got rid of them.
“What did happen to the body?” I asked now, ready to hear the answer. Maybe Jimmy had buried him.
“Everyone knew your dad disappeared,” Rory said. “But we all thought the mother f—” Faith punched him in the arm. Rubbing his arm, Rory finished, “We all thought the son-of-gun abandoned you, Jimmy.”
“He did!” I defended. How much more can a boy be abandoned by having a father who did what he did?
“Joy.” Rory’s voice was soft now. “We know what you mean, but why lie anymore? WE know everything else, that he was a monster. Nobody’s blaming anyone. So what happened to his body?”
Jimmy who’d taken his seat at the table scraped his chair back, leaned forward, legs wide, hands on his knees. His dark eyes were thick with a building storm.
“I went back to the creek after I took Joy home. He was still there. Still dead. Once everything started to sink in, I got scared. I was just a kid, you know? Not that it’s an excuse for what I did to cover it up. But I was just a kid.”
“No better reason,” piped up Carey’s husband. Nanette’s husband nodded as we all stared at them, even their wives. I’d always wondered if they even liked being part of our family. They never talked to any of us, even when they worked with our brothers.
“So, you found his body still there,” River said, trying to help out. “You were scared, rightfully so, and then what?”
“I threw him in the back of the truck.” He was silent for a minute, his jaw working. I wanted to get up and walk around the table, hold him, comfort him, but that’s not how you treated a man like Jimmy. He wasn’t needing my sympathy.
“Then what.” River.
“Then I took him to your place.”
“Our place.” Carey stood. “Whatever for?!”
“Sit down, Carey.” Rory held his hand up. He could always calm a storm.
“To throw him into the spring.”
River shook his head, unbelieving. “Where Daddy’s Spring of Good Luck pours back into the ground? You threw him into the bottomless cave?”
“I hope it’s bottomless,” I said, finally finding my own voice again.
Silence. Shifting. Breathing. Throat Clearing. And then, a sound I didn’t expect. I looked up at River.
“Holy Hell!” And he was laughing. “You threw that devil into the hole?”
Nanette and Carey both shushed him. He waved their chastisement away. “Mother Fudger . . . into that bottomless cave?” He laughed so loud that I worried the kids might run in to see what was going on.
“Perfect,” River said.
“What?” I looked at him to see if he was okay.
“I couldn’t have thought of a better plan myself,” Rory said.
“Rory!” Carey was standing with her hands on her hips. She might have unwound just a little bit, but it was obvious I needed to remind her about making some of those Whoopie pies with her husband.
River stopped laughing. “Can you think of a better way to have gotten rid of him, Sis?”
Her face turned red, she looked at me, and then something different than self-righteousness took over her face. They were talking about the man that took away my youth, after all.
“Did this man ever go to church, Jimmy?”
“Refused to hear the word,” Jimmy said. “Hated the church. My grandma tried to help him, but he was mean to her, too. Mean to other people, not only Joy, in ways that don’t bear repeating.”
“So he didn’t want to change?”
Jimmy laughed, but the sound held no humor. “Carey. I’m not just trying to justify what I did, but my dad wasn’t one of those hard cases who wanted to change and just couldn’t stick to it. He didn’t try. He didn’t want to. He never did. If you don’t believe that, then you didn’t listen to Joy on the day she told you all what happened.”
“Well,” Carey said. “In that case, I would’ve thrown him in alive.” And at that moment, I believed the new Carey might have done just that. “I would’ve knocked his teeth out.”
Nanette smiled, like a thought had just occurred to her. “I think he did. That’s why you had that tooth in that charm that you threw into the well, right?”
“How did you know I threw it in the well?” I hadn’t told anyone about that, and I doubted Ruthie had either.
Nanette chuckled. “After Bobby’s trouble, I started looking for Ruthie’s diary. I finally found it up in your attic the other day. Found out that she’s a good girl, but that you and her have been having some little side adventures this summer.”
“True,” I said.
“What I don’t understand,” interjected my sister-in-law Faith, “Is why I don’t remember him being missing. I know I am younger than the rest of you, but seems something like a missing man would have been talked about over the years.”
River shot Jimmy an apologetic look. “Nobody ever looked. I heard there were people glad he disappeared.”
Jimmy looked sad as he nodded in agreement.
“And,” Rory added. “Nobody cares.”
“I do,” Jimmy said. “It was wrong.”
And this is when Carey became my favorite sister. Who knew her self-righteous, religious zealot attitude would really help someone someday?
“Jimmy, if you believe those words you sing every Sunday, you know you are forgiven.” And to my surprise, Jimmy who’d never had much use for Carey, hugged her. She blushed so red that her husband at the other end of the table chuckled.
“So it’s done,” River said. “We’re not gonna talk about this again, agreed?” He stood and walked to the edge of the table, lay his hand on it. The rest of us joined him, ready to agree.
“Now wait a minute, all of you.” Nanette held her hands up, palms out at her seat. Everyone pulled their hands back. “Is it at all worth telling the police now? Is it possible they might see that it was self-defense and nothing bad will come of this?”
The rest of us looked at her, deadpan.
“The sheriff around here just got arrested for selling drugs to your son,” I reminded her.
“Okay,” she said. “I was just trying to be the voice of reason. But I agree with all of you.”
“Then get your butt over here,” River ordered. “We’re making a pact for Joy and Jimmy.”
Rory thrust his hand into the circle. “We ain’t telling no one.”
We overlapped our hands on top of Rory’s, Jimmy’s closing over mine at the top.
We all sat silent for a long time after that, the boys shaking their heads, the girls smiling, and Jimmy and I staring at each other across the room, the distance that had grown between us over the years shrinking a whole lot more.
Chapter Thirty
‡
From then on, we Talleys lost our taste for the spring water that ran from the caves above our property. The Spring of Good Luck was now bad. Nobody ever mentioned the villain again, and I started reading my romance novels right out in the open. Carey never said a word about my scandalous reading choices. My only regret was that I couldn’t read under the apple tree anymore, but thanks to my brother
s, maybe the nieces and nephews will be able to someday. While I was at The Tulip House for Girls, my brothers had enlisted Bobby and his friend Carl to cut away the fallen trunk of the magic apple tree and all its branches, preserving the massive stump and stacking the logs along the side of the house to be used in our new fireplace. With its rings exposed, the tree finally revealed its age. It was indeed as old as Momma claimed.
“One-hundred and sixty-five,” Ruthie told me when I’d arrived home. Such an old age for an apple tree in this part of the country was rare, but so were a lot of other things that had to do with my family.
In another part of the orchard, they had planted a new apple tree. The part that made me smile was that Jimmy had gotten a cutting to propagate from Doc. It turned out that Kyle’s own mother had a tree that was propagated from ours years earlier when Grandma Bess sold cuttings from the magic apple tree to make extra cash.
“Doc was happy to give it to us,” Jimmy had explained. “With one exception.”
“What’s that?” I was nervous that Kyle would never forgive me for my choice.
“That you call it the miracle apple tree.”
I tried the name on for size. “The Miracle Apple Tree. I like it, don’t you?”
“I do,” he said. “And with any luck, it will take off and live to be at least as old as its magic grandmother did.”
I only hoped we could keep the property long enough for future Talleys to witness another old apple tree. Now that would be a miracle.
The sun dipped low in the sky as the porch swing cricked and creaked beneath me. For some reason, the house stood prouder these days, but I couldn’t prove how I knew. Its blue paint still flaked around the edges and some of its lace curtain bedecked windows still needed replaced, but it had livened up with all the attention it was getting lately. I imagined it was happy to have visitors teaming inside again. No outlaws, just people stopping by for iced tea, strawberry-lemon cake, sugar cookies, and Carey’s famous Whoopie pies that she finally got her husband to help her make. My favorite times were when the ladies, and always Peter, came over to crochet or brainstorm new ways to help out the community.
Chance and Marvel, new friends we’d gotten for our yippy little Daffy, livened things up around the place, too, darting back and forth across the yard and through the orchard where the branches grew heavier with fruit, chasing rabbits and sniffing out squirrels. Boy, I sure fell in love with those mutts fast. I can’t believe we waited so long to get them. But of course, I did know. It was Momma. She had gotten rid of so many pleasures after Daddy died and spent so much time trying to fix us with her teas and worries. She worried about so many things.
But we’re fine now, Momma. Don’t worry anymore.
On the day Fernie came to visit like a prodigal daughter to apologize to her dad for being so distant to him since we’d been dating, we had dinner simmering on the stove and were sitting out in the shade of the porch like two old people, and I loved it. My eyes swept the orchard and I thought about how we’d at last found someone to lease five hundred acres to, which was better than having Jimmy pay all the bills. We Talleys might not be much in the eyes of the world, but we are proud. What of? Not of how our legacy looks on the outside, our proud century old house falling down around us, or our ancient apple tree now ready to fuel our fireplace that once was unusable, but sticking together was something to be proud of. We also have a history that nobody around those parts could match when it came to unique attention-grabbing adventure. And how many people can claim to have people who had seen the other side of this life and come back from it? It was still hard to believe I was one of those Talleys.
What I saw and heard in my coma happened, and it was a miracle, not magic. At least not the kind of magic Momma was thinking of. And it wasn’t anything to do with luck. I think that Daddy’s ghost had been trying for years to lift that thin curtain and give us a glimpse of heaven—to show us there was more than luck and magic. It’s veiled from us, but it’s just . . . right . . . there.
“Did I ever thank you for coming back to me, Jimmy?”
Beside me, his arm tightened around my shoulder. “Only fifty-three times.”
“Is that all?”
“I reckon you better start on fifty-four now.”
I tilted my face to meet his lips. Oh how many kisses have we missed? Only thousands more to go.
We heard Fernie’s car coming down the gravel road before the dogs did.
“Looks like Fernie’s coming for dinner,” Jimmy said.
The dogs barked at the heels of her sleek black Camaro. Jimmy met her at the steps and gave her a kiss.
“You want some tea?” I asked. “Ruthie made some for us just this afternoon.”
“River is waiting,” she said, and shot me a shy smile. “I just stopped by to give you something he sent over.”
I saw that she was holding a small satchel. Jimmy pointed to it.
“Whatcha got there, Sweet Pea?”
She pulled out several pages of a very old-looking book that had been bound together with a piece of twine.
“River found this when he was working on the chimney and threw it in his work bag. He wanted to show it to the girls because it was neat. But when we got to looking at it, we noticed it has something here on the back cover that looks a lot like a treasure map.”
“A what?”
“And then I remembered that plaque that the boys found when they were cleaning up the chimney mess.”
“Talley Luck is Well-treasured in this Home,” I quoted.
Now that was unexpected, but I guess that secrets really do find their way out when they’re ready to be told. By the time she left, I really did believe in second chances, and, maybe—buried treasure, too.
Chapter Thirty-one
‡
“Do you see anything?”
“Nothing yet,” Rory called up. But it’s really not as deep down here as I thought. I can stand up in it.”
River and Jimmy were bent over the opening wearing head lamps, while Bobby shined a Mag light down into the secret well in our basement.
“Just don’t go poking around too much, because you’re standing in a cave,” River said. “And it leads to God only knows where.”
And maybe to the bones of a certain villain, but we won’t mention that.
I shivered. “Y’all be careful.”
“I still can’t believe that Fernie was able to find this map.” Nanette’s voice whispered into the half-light. “She is one sharp girl.”
“That’s what college will do you for,” I told her, hoping Ruthie and Bobby were both listening.
“I can’t believe there was a map in the first place,” Carey said.
One thing is for sure. I’m hanging the plaque that says “Talley Luck Is Well Treasured in This Home” between Momma’s and Daddy’s portraits in the living room. How would we have ever guessed the plaque meant there was really a treasure hidden in the well?
“Just be glad we made the connection when we did,” I said.
“Do you see any snakes down there?” Carey called down into the well.
“No,” shouted Rory. “Do you think I would still be down here if I did?”
“I can’t believe Momma and Daddy never told us about this,” Nanette said.
“Maybe they didn’t know,” Carey commented.
“Bobby and Ruthie,” Nanette said, visibly shivering in the light of the dim bulb hanging from the ceiling. “I’m surprised you kids never found this well when you were little, as much as you disobeyed us by sniffing around the passageways.”
Ruthie didn’t mention to her mother that she’d already been down there with me when I tossed the charm into the well.
“I’m about ready to come back up,” Rory called up, disappointment evident in his tone. “I haven’t found anything.”
“It was worth a try,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. Even as my heart sank, I suddenly felt stupid for hoping the treasure was real.
<
br /> “Easy for you to say,” River muttered. “You’re aren’t the one holding the rope for Junior down there. He needs to stop eating Joy’s pot roast.”
“Coming up,” Rory called, his voice echoing through the basement’s depths.
Bobby held the light while River and Jimmy held tight to the chain ladder.
“Let’s get you up.” River groaned.
“So there’s no treasure?” Ruthie.
“I’m afraid not,” her mother said. “I know you kids are disappointed, but let’s get Uncle Rory out of that hole and get outta here. It creeps me out.”
“Maybe it’s somewhere else,” Ruthie said, still clinging to hope the way a child clings to fairytales.
“Honey, there’s no buried—”
Just then we heard a clank and a splash as if rocks were falling into the well.
“Damn it,” River exclaimed. We didn’t correct his language anymore. If there was one thing that was probably never going to change in this family, it was Rory’s and River’s potty mouths.
Bobby turned to us girls. “A bunch of rocks fell out of the wall. One hit him in the head.”
I rushed forward. “Is he okay?”
Rory, cursed from the bottom of the well.
“What do I have to do for someone to get me out of here?”
“The chain ladder broke,” Jimmy called to him. “We’ll get another ladder.”
It took some time, but eventually the men managed to get a regular construction ladder down into the basement and into the well. It wasn’t quite tall enough to reach the top, but the water was shallow enough the ladder would get Rory high enough the men could grab him.
“Wait,” he called, and then, “Holy crap!”
I think we all thought of water moccasins as the men leaned perilously forward, ready to pull him to safety.
“Rory?”
Bobby angled the light down into the hole.
“What is it?”
Waking Up Joy Page 23