High Lonesome Sound

by Jaye Wells

  “I hear you. Being in that cabin was getting kind of lonely. It’s nice to have someone to chat with.”

  “Well, I’m afraid most of us ain’t in a real chatty mood this morning.” She leaned in to share secrets. “Did you hear about poor Jack Thompson?”

  He leaned in too, inviting her confidences. “The boy in the mine? Lettie told me.” He shook his head. “Such a shame.”

  Edna put her pad to her chest. “Terrible to lose someone so young. Especially with Jack being such a hero in these parts. The whole town’s broken up.”

  “Lettie said she wasn’t sure about when the funeral would be,” he prompted.

  “They’re doing a visitation tonight and the funeral is tomorrow.”

  “So soon?”

  “Nell—that’s Jack’s poor mama—told Mrs. McDuffy who told me that the deacon convinced her that doing it quick would be best. Help us all start healing instead of dragging things out.”

  “I’m sure the deacon knows best.”

  She nodded. “We’re blessed to have his guidance through hard times.”

  “Edna,” called a male voice.

  Peter looked over to see Earl Sharps, the man he’d met with Bunk the day before, standing by the counter expectantly.

  “Oops, better get back to work,” Edna said. “I’ll get you that coffee in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

  “I’m in no hurry,” he assured her.

  As she scurried off to talk to Sharps, he sat back in the booth and watched the other man take her by the arm to whisper something in her ear. Her gaze flashed in Peter’s direction and she shook her head. Finally, Sharps released her and she disappeared back into the kitchen. The man retook his seat and turned his back on Peter, but the man’s awareness of his presence was as palpable as the booth springs poking his rear end.

  He removed his notebook from his pocket to jot down some notes. As he wrote down his observations about the diner and the people in it, his brain analyzed the odds of getting run out of town if he attended the funeral. His conscience told him that crashing a man’s funeral was the height of inappropriateness, and his sense of duty argued that he’d come to Moon Hollow to work, not to get involved in the town’s dramas. Still, he was curious to see how a town like this one handled tragedy. It was in times of stress that people’s true character came through, and he was intensely curious to see what Jack Thompson’s death brought out in this place and its people.

  He’d become so caught up in writing his musings that he didn’t notice Edna’s return until she set a coffee mug on the table.

  “Food’ll be up in a minute,” she snapped and walked away.

  He watched her go, realizing belatedly he should have covered his notes. Had she seen the words he’d used to describe her? He couldn’t imagine most people would be thrilled to see someone making notes about their appearance and personality based on a two-minute conversation.

  Ed Sharps patted her arm as she walked by. That’s when Peter realized that her change in demeanor hadn’t had anything to do with his writing, but was the result of pressure from the deacon’s henchman to give the new stranger in town the cold shoulder. The problem was, Ed Sharps didn’t understand something fundamental about human nature—and Peter’s personality specifically. Acting like there was something to hide only made him more determined to investigate.

  Ed Sharps also didn’t understand that the worst thing he could do at that moment if he wanted Peter gone was to approach him. But that’s exactly what happened.

  The man got off his stool and sauntered over. The cup of coffee in his hand was fresh and steaming thanks to Edna. “Mr. West,” he said by way of greeting.

  Peter took a nice long sip of coffee before responding. “Morning, Ed.”

  The other man’s mouth tightened at his familiarity. “May I?”

  He tipped his chin toward the other booth. “Suit yourself.”

  Once Ed was settled he made a real show of trying to look casual, as if he was just being friendly and not preparing to issue the threat he’d come over to deliver. “I spoke to Lettie this morning. She said you were asking some questions about Jack Thompson.”

  Peter frowned. “That’s a bit of a mischaracterization. Lettie told me about how he died and I—”

  “We’re private people here in Moon Hollow. I sure hope you’re not planning on using our tragedy as fodder for your little stories.”

  Peter had expected ham-fisted threats and posturing. Ed’s directness threw him off. “I can assure you it’s not my intention to make money off anyone’s pain.”

  It wasn’t exactly a lie. After all, if he ended up including a death in the small town in his novel, the cause would most likely be supernatural in nature, not a mundane mining accident. Thus far everything he’d heard about the Thompson boy’s death pointed to it being an accident—a rookie miner on his first day making a dumb mistake, nothing more. Ed didn’t understand that everything writers hear, see, or experience becomes material for stories. It wasn’t that they wanted to take advantage of people’s misfortunes so much as they were inspired by them. He was pretty sure if he explained that to Ed or anyone else in Moon Hollow he’d get run out of town with a bunch of torches and pitchforks at his back.

  “Still, I think it would be best for you to leave.”

  There it was. He wondered if Deacon Fry had made Ed rehearse his speech in front of a mirror first. “Or what?”

  “Or nothing. I ain’t threatening you, Mr. West. I’m simply stating facts. The town’s hurting right now. We need to come together to help heal, and, frankly, you’re not one of us. Your presence is a distraction we don’t need.”

  Peter rubbed his lower lip and considered. “Look, I’m not leaving. I paid for two weeks in that cabin and I intend to get my money’s worth. But I can promise you that I will stay away from the visitation and the funeral. I need to focus on my writing anyway.”

  Ed linked his fingers together around his coffee mug. “See, we got ourselves a problem, Mr. West, because I got no reason to trust you.”

  “Fair enough,” Peter said. “I got no reason to promise you a damned thing, either, but I have no desire to stir up problems. I’m damned sorry that you’re all in pain, and I have no desire to add to it. However, I have a right to be here and I intend to stay until my rent is up.”

  “I can call Sheriff Abernathy.”

  Peter chuckled. “And tell him what? I’m not breaking any laws.”

  Ed leaned forward with a hard look in his eyes. “You city fellas think you’re so smart, don’t ya? Folks that grow up on the concrete don’t know nothing about the laws of the mountain. If I call Sheriff Abernathy, he’ll run you out of town just because you don’t belong. It ain’t about breaking laws or not. It’s about doing what’s proper according to our ways.”

  Peter leaned forward, too. “Ed, I know you’re acting on the authority of Deacon Fry, who by the way is also not the law—”

  Ed snorted. “He’s the mayor, Mr. West.”

  Peter paused. “What?”

  The other man smiled, clearly pleased to have surprised his adversary. “That’s right. He’s been mayor for a decade now.”

  He held up a hand. “Why does he go by ‘deacon’ if he’s the mayor? Surely holding elected office would trump the ecclesiastical one.”

  Ed frowned liked he didn’t quite follow all the words. “That’s the problem. You think the law of man outranks God’s laws. He goes by ‘deacon’ because being a servant of the Lord is more important.”

  Peter leaned back, shaking his head. “Mayor. I can’t believe it.”

  “Your own lack of faith isn’t my problem, Mr. West. Point is, one call from Deacon Fry and Sheriff Abernathy’ll come running.”

  By that point, Peter became aware of the silence surrounding them. He looked around to see all eyes on their booth. For the first time, it hit home that he might see the people of Moon Hollow as unworldly hicks, but they saw him as an actual threat. People who felt t
hreatened were liable to do all sorts of desperate things to get rid of the menace. He might not have done anything illegal, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t stoop to breaking laws to get rid of him.

  “I think we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot here. I don’t know what I’ve done to offend you or Deacon Fry, but I swear I am only here to get some work done in peace. There’s really no cause to get the sheriff involved. I just want to be left alone, and in return I’ll stay out of everyone’s business.”

  Ed thought this over for a moment. He finished off his coffee and stood up before answering. “All right, then, but we’ll be watching you, Mr. West.”

  “There’s no need, but I understand.”

  But the thing was, he didn’t. Not really. For some reason he’d been able to convince himself that the unwelcoming attitudes of the deacon and his flunkies was just sort of what people in small towns did. He’d seen that dynamic in dozens of films and books, hadn’t he?

  Problem was, he had a bad habit of seeing everyone as potential characters in his stories and not as real people. Real people were scary. He couldn’t control them, for one thing. Real people were unpredictable and selfish and prone to fits of illogical behavior. He’d have to be more careful now. Stay in his cabin for a couple of days. Hopefully, Deacon Fry and his flunkies would be too busy burying that boy to give him any grief.

  He stood and threw a twenty on the table. He’d lost his appetite anyway. But when he got to the door, he heard his name and turned. Edna was standing by the counter with a plate in her hand. “Your breakfast, Mr. West.”

  He opened his mouth to respond, but Ed beat him to it. “Mr. West needs to be going. Ain’t that right?” He openly challenged Peter with his gaze.

  He wanted nothing more than to lay that man low with a perfect come back. Certainly he was capable of such a thing. Words, after all, were his greatest weapon. But his talk with Ed had been a bit of a gut check, so instead of launching a verbal attack, he simply nodded and slipped out the door. As he walked down the sidewalk, he felt about ten kinds of coward, but men who wielded words as weapons had to be careful when their adversaries carried shotguns.

  22

  Skeletons

  Ruby

  The morning after her visit with Granny Maypearl, Ruby opened the door to the attic, which was right next door to her room. She usually tried to pretend the attic space didn’t exist. It was musty and dark in there, and the crates and boxes inside held so many ghosts now that Mama was gone. But after everything Granny had told her, she couldn’t resist the urge to go find out if the old woman had been telling the truth.

  The space was still as dank as she remembered, but there were way more cobwebs than her memory had told her to expect. She flipped on the flashlight and shined it at the cardboard boxes under the dormer. She’d put them there herself a few weeks earlier after Daddy had told her to pack all of Mama’s things or else he’d throw it all away.

  Since she’d packed those boxes herself, she knew they didn’t contain any clues to what happened during Mama’s time away from Moon Hollow. She turned toward another wall, where old trunks and crates were piled to the rafters. She opened the first trunk and found her daddy’s old mining helmet inside. It had been five years since he’d retired from the mines because of his lungs. Although, these days she wondered which was blacker—his lungs or his heart?

  The next box was full of old baby pictures of her parents and black and white photos of relatives going back a couple of generations. A girl with crooked braids in one picture stood alone on the bowed porch of a tiny house. She held a fiddle in her hand. Her face was dirty but she was smiling and had a determined twinkle in her eyes. Ruby turned over the picture. It said Rose Maypearl, age 12. She flipped it back over and studied her mama. The woman she’d known rarely smiled and looked more resigned than determined even on a good day.

  The next picture she pulled out was of Granny Maypearl. It had been taken back before she’d been anyone’s granny. Her hair hung in a long, dark braid over her shoulder and she squinted at the camera while she smoked an old corncob pipe. She recognized the expression because she’d seen it on Granny’s face at least three times the day before. She placed both photos in her pocket and closed the box to continue her search.

  Footsteps on the stairs warned her of the arrival of one of her sisters. “Ruby?”

  “In here,” she called. She put the next box she reached out of the way because it was labeled in her mama’s neat script, R’s baby things.

  “Ruby,” Jinny whined, “Sissy hid my shoes again.”

  She opened the next box. That one held dusty Christmas decorations. She closed it and pushed it aside. “Tell her if she doesn’t give them back, she can’t watch cartoons after school.”

  “She don’t listen to me.”

  “Doesn’t,” Ruby corrected. “Wear another pair then.”

  “But they’re my favorites.”

  Ruby sighed and turned with her hands on her hips. “If you don’t want to wear other shoes then you’re going to have to figure out how to convince her yourself.”

  “But—”

  “I don’t want to hear it. I got more important things to do than play referee for you two.”

  Jinny crossed her arms. “What’re you doing up here, anyway?”

  “None of your business.”

  “What’s got you in such a bad mood?”

  She hadn’t told her youngest sister about Jack’s death. Sissy was old enough that she’d heard about the death at school the day after it happened, but Ruby had made her swear not to tell her sister. They’d just finally gotten to the point where Jinny didn’t wake up every night screaming for Mama, and Ruby was afraid the news about Jack might cause her to backslide.

  So instead of telling Jinny the real reason she’d been so crabby for the last couple of days, she told her a half-truth. “I can’t find something I need.”

  “Can I help?” Her tone was so hopeful that Ruby didn’t have the heart to send her away.

  “Sure. Why don’t you look through those boxes over there.” The ones she pointed to were the ones she knew contained the girls’ old toys.

  As expected, Jinny was delighted to find her old toys and immediately got busy playing with them. With her occupied, Ruby got back to work looking for her mama’s past.

  She found it five minutes later in an old trunk at the bottom of a pile of old coats. The shoebox looked innocent enough, but when she opened it, she found brochures from a few Nashville tourist spots, an old journal with a picture of a kitten on the front, and a cardboard jewelry box with a charm bracelet inside. She lifted the last item and saw that the single charm was shaped like a guitar with the word “Nashville” creating the neck of the instrument. There was also a small disk with the letter “R” written on it linked in the chain. At some point in the past the metal has been silver in tone but now it was tarnished.

  “What’s that?” Jinny asked.

  Ruby looked up but hid the bracelet in her clenched palm. “Just an old piece of junk.”

  Luckily, her sister’s interest dissolved quickly in favor of digging through the box in front of her for clothes for the naked doll in her hand. Ruby tucked the bracelet in the pocket of her jeans and moved to the journal.

  There was a small clasp with a tiny lock holding it closed. Ruby rooted through the shoebox for the key, but came up empty handed. It wouldn’t be too hard for her to pick a lock like that with a bobby pin or a paperclip, but she still felt frustrated. She knew that the answers she wanted were inside that journal but if she rushed out and started trying to pick the lock, the girls would get curious and try to see what she was doing.

  She knew it was selfish, but she didn’t want them to know what she was doing. The Mama that she was looking for existed long before Sissy and Jinny came along, and it would be a few years yet before they could relate to the almost-woman their mother had been when she left Moon Hollow. But to Ruby it felt like a message left for her b
y the past-Mama to help her make decisions about her future.

  She placed the journal back in the box and closed the lid. “Put them toys away and come on.”

  Jinny looked up from wedging a tiny plastic shoe on her doll. “Can I take them with me?”

  Ruby looked down at her little sister. Most of the time, she had the typical older sister feelings toward the girls. They were always annoying her and she sometimes wished Mama and Daddy had made her an only child. But ever since Mama died and Ruby became the woman of the house, she developed a new protective instinct toward them. At moments like these, she felt sorry for them. Ruby had gotten her mama for eighteen years. But Jinny was only eight and Sissy was twelve. Now, they both had to grow up without Mama’s warm hands to guide them or her soft voice saying just the right thing when they were upset.

  Looking down into Jinny’s small face with the freckles sprinkled across her nose—Mama always called them “angel kisses”—Ruby realized it was up to her to be the warm hands and soft voice for her sisters now. Except she wouldn’t be able to do that if she left.

  Could she really count on Granny being there for them? She hadn’t been there for Mama—or any of them—all those years. Granny claimed it was her daddy’s fault, and she believed he might be the reason for the fight that started the separation, but the way she saw it, she couldn’t imagine any mother turning her back on her daughter because of a silly fight.

  “Ruby?” Jinny said. “You okay?”

  Ruby cleared away the knot in her throat. “Yeah.”

  Jinny held up the doll with its ratty hair. It wore one shoe and a shirt but didn’t have any pants on. Something about that half-naked doll made her incredibly sad.

  “You can take the toys.”

  As her little sister whooped with joy, Ruby clutched the shoebox in her hand. She’d wait until the girls got off to school to read what was inside. If she were lucky, she’d find something to help her make up her mind about whether to stay or to go. She no longer knew which outcome she was wishing for.