A Misty Mourning (10 page)

“Oh, yes,” I said, aware of the story of Mr. Morris and his ill-fated pioneer family. “Well, there's lots more to know about Native Americans than that.”

“What are you?” he asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Your nationality?”

“I'm an American, silly.” With that I walked away, shoving a deviled egg in my mouth as I went. I sat down across from Gert, and as I had expected, she was already finished eating.

What I hadn't expected was for Pastor Breedlove to follow me to my table, with Lafayette Hart on his heels, and sit down across from me. “We're all Americans,” he said. “But what were your ancestors?”

“Little bit of this, little bit of that. Basically, though, my ancestors from this area were Scotch-Irish. Just like everybody else's in this area,” I said. “Why the interest in my ancestors, Pastor?”

“Just wonderin' if we were related,” he said.

“Go back a few generations, I wouldn't doubt it.” And that was a fact. I have a cousin who is my cousin so many times in so many different ways that we are more related to each other than if we were brother and sister.

“This is my grandmother,” I said. “Gertrude Crookshank. Originally, Seaborne.”

“Seaborne?” he said and nodded at her. “Nice to meet you.”

It was quiet a moment until Lafayette finally spoke up. “Gertie's mother was Bridie McClanahan.”

Now I doubt seriously that Pastor Breedlove was old enough to remember a woman who had died very young in 1926. But the look on his face said that he at least knew of her. “Bridie Mac,” he stated.

“Excuse me?” I asked. “What do you mean, Bridie Mac?”

“ ‘Lies all those lies, sharp as a tack. Need to keep a secret, tell Bridie Mac,' “ he chanted.

I cannot tell you the peculiar feeling that crept down my spine, causing goose bumps to break out along my neck and arms. Was this something he had just made up? If so, why? And if it wasn't something that he had just made up off the top of his head, its implications were quite disturbing.

I was speechless, unable to say a word. I suppose the look on my face relayed everything I was feeling and thinking, because the pastor became very somber and apologetic. “Forgive me,” he said.

“What. . . what was that?” I asked. I looked to Gert, who seemed as disturbed as I, but in a different way.

“You know those rhymes that kids on the playground chant when they're a-doin' things like hopscotch? Somethin' I heard as a kid,” he said. “I didn't mean to trouble you.”

“Not at all,” I said, recovering enough to take a bite of some excellent potato salad. We all ate in silence for a few moments. Two little girls, in their frilly Sunday best, ran around the churchyard :hasing each other with chocolate ice-cream cones. I really wanted to talk to my girls.

“So, tell me, Lafayette,” I said. “I had a cashier at breakfast ask me something about two miners who either disappeared or had some terrible fate befall them. Do you know what she's referring tor

Lafayette snapped his plastic fork in two trying to pick up a piece of his pork steak. “Mm, not sure.”

“It was said in reference to your mother and the boardinghouse. The woman said that now we may never know what happened to those miners. What was she talking about?” I asked.

Lafayette looked good for his seventy-one years. He normally had healthy coloring, but at the moment he looked a little peaked. He didn't get a chance to answer me, Pastor Breedlove answered for him.

“Oh, she's probably talkin' about those two miners a long time ago that went a-missing and nobody ever saw again. Rumor has it,” he said, raising his eyebrows so as to appear mysterious or spooky, “they was last seen in the company of Brother Hart's mother, Clarissa.”

I loved the way he just told me all of that without a second thought. It was clear that this was something Lafayette either didn't want me to know or was trying to think of a way to express. Pastor Breedlove saw no danger in it, so he just came out with it. All I could do was nod and say, “You don't say, Pastor Breedlove. You don't say.”

“
A
re you being a good girl?” I asked. I stood in the great room of the boardinghouse, scratching my belly with one hand and holding the phone with the other.

“I've been good, but Rachel is seriously disturved, Mom,” Mary answered.

“That's
disturbed,
with a b,” I said.

“Whatever,” she said. “She likes Brian Filmore, and he's, like, the rudest boy in the whole school. And just because I told him that she liked him, she punched me in the head and now I have a big bruise.”

“I've told you before, you're not supposed to do that sort of thing,” I said.

“Yeah, but she coulda killed me! She punched me right in the head. What if I get a tumor?” she asked.

“You won't get a tumor from that. You be nice to Rachel,” I said. “Put her on the phone.”

Mary pulled the phone away from her mouth maybe an inch or two and yelled Rachel's name at the top of her lungs. I jerked the phone away from my ear as the shrillness of her scream went straight to my eardrum.

“Hello?” Rachel said. I could tell that she picked up the other phone instead of taking the one that Mary was holding.

“What are you doing punching Mary in the head?”

“Hi, Mom. How are you?”

“I'm fine,” I said. “You're not being good like I asked you to be.”

“She told Brian Filmore that I wanted to kiss him and I can't stand him—”

“Uh-uh,” Mary butted in. “You like him, yes you do.”

“All right, Mary, get off the phone,” I said. After several moments of protestations she finally did as I asked. “Rachel, you're grounded from swimming for the rest of the week.”

“Mom!”

“You don't go around punching people, especially somebody who's half your size,” I explained.

“Do you know what Brian Filmore looks like, Mother?” Rachel asked, obviously frustrated with me.

“I don't care if he looks like Chewbacca—”

“Chewbacca is adorable compared to him. He never brushes his teeth,” she said.

“Regardless. It wasn't nice of Mary to tell him that, but you just can't go and punch her,” I said. “That's not appropriate behavior.”

“Fine,” she said. I could just see her on the other end of the phone tapping her feet and rolling her eyes heavenward.

What I couldn't figure out was why Rudy hadn't grounded her. I guessed he was waiting for me to lay down the punishment. The more Rachel and Mary began acting like sisters, the more Rudy sort of let me decide the appropriate punishment for things. I'm not sure I appreciated my new responsibility.

“Let me talk to your grandma,” I said.

“Hello,” my mother said.

“Hey, Mom,” I said. “So Rudy's at the ball game?”

“Yeah. He got two free tickets from his boss, and so he took Chuck Velasco,” she explained.

“Oh,” I said. “Tell him I called.”

“You sound down,” she said.

“I am,” I answered. “I called because I was missing him and the girls really bad, and I get attacked by two quarreling children. Then the man of my dreams is off at the ball game.”

“Poor thing,” she said in an overly pitying tone of voice.

“Exactly,” I said. “I'm feeling very vulnerable.”

“You'll get over it,” she said. “You always do.”

“Gee, thanks. Mom.”

“So . . . how's the visit going?”

“Good,” I said. “Clarissa died in her sleep, we think, or she may have been suffocated. She left me the boardinghouse plus ten acres and everything in it, and Norville Gross was attacked by a panther, we think, or somebody could have hacked him up. He didn't survive. All in all it's been a fairly exciting vacation.”

My mother was quiet on the other end. “You're not joking,” she said.

“No. Oh, and you didn't hear any of this from me, because I wasn't supposed to tell you about it.”

“Why?”

“Colin told me not to tell you. But you're my mother and I tell you everything.”

“I've been really uptight over the wedding. I'm having trouble finding somebody who will make you a maternity maid-of-honor dress,” she said. “And they were out of the seafoam-green that I wanted, so I may have to go with peach. I wanted seafoam-green. And the dresses for Rachel and Mary are going to cost twice what I thought.”

Every time I think I've forgotten that she's getting married and moving out of my house, she goes and reminds me. “Peach is nice,” I said.

“I wanted seafoam-green.”

“But peach is nice, Mom.”

“Anyway, Colin is worried about me being all upset. He says he can see my blood pressure rising every time something else goes
wrong,” she said. “I'm sure that's why he didn't want you to tell me all of that.”

Great. Now I felt like a heel. I suppose I should have felt like a heel, but she had always been my confidante. “It's nothing,” I said. “Gert is holding up just fine and the state is as gorgeous as always.”

“Hasn't changed?” she asked.

“No, the mountains are still here, believe it or not.”

“Have you seen Milly yet?”

“We're going this afternoon,” I said.

“Tell her she better be here in August,” my mother said.

“I will. Well, I better get going, Mom. It was good to hear your voice. Tell Rudy I called,” I said.

“I will,” she said. “Victory—”

“Yes?”

“What do you mean you inherited a boardinghouse, ten acres, and all of its contents?”

L
ate Sunday evening my grandmother and I hopped in the car and drove south along the Gauley River to the town of Ellens-dale, where my mother's sister, Millicent, lived. Not only did we go so we could spend the evening with Aunt Milly, but our departure would give the sheriff and his deputies time to do whatever it was they were doing at the boardinghouse. Gathering evidence, I presumed.

“Make a left here,” Gert said.

“Where?”

“Here.”

I looked to where she was pointing and saw nothing. There was no road. The blacktop that we were on meandered down into the valley, eventually wandering its way through the town of Ellensdale, but off to the left was nothing but tall grass. There was at least an acre of flat land that stretched out before rising into one of the biggest peaks in the area.

“Just turn,” she shouted at me.

“Okay,” I said. When I had the car crossing the opposite lane I saw the slightest tracks of what could have been a road. I pulled in and followed it across the flat land. Then came the mountain.

“Are you sure we should try this?” I asked. “Maybe we should rent a four-wheel drive. I don't want to get so jostled around that my water breaks.”

“I went up mountains bigger than this in a horse-drawn buggy when I was pregnant, and it never made my water break,” she declared.

“Yes, but there's always a first time, Granny. And if there's some unusual thing waiting to happen to somebody, it's going to happen to me.”

“You worry too much,” she said.

“I do not.”

“Are you gonna go up that road or not?”

“No,” I folded my arms as best I could across my belly.

“Oh, for Pete's sake, as soon as you get around the bend, hers is the first house,” she said.

“I was up this road when I was a lot younger with somebody else driving, and I don't remember it being so harmless. Didn't Rudy scrape the whole bottom of his car or something?” It had been fourteen or so years since I'd been to Aunt Millicent's house. Before that, I was a teenager.

“Oh, for Pete's sake,” she said again, and opened her car door.

“Where are you going?”

“I'm gonna walk!” She pulled her cane out of the front seat and cussed under her breath when it got caught on the seat belt. “Gosh darn it, anyhow.”

“Gert. Gert, get in the car. You can barely walk across the room without getting dizzy, you sure as heck can't climb up this mountain. Now get in!”

“Are you gonna drive up there?”

I tapped my fingers impatiently on the steering wheel. “Yes. Now get in.”

She got back in the car, smug as she could be. I wanted to bop her a good one, but what would that solve? I put the car in second gear and headed up the mountain. I only went about eight miles an
hour because, I didn't care what she said about horse-drawn buggies, I wasn't taking a chance on prematurely breaking my water.

“You know what the Indians said when they came to the junction of the Gauley River and the New River?” Gert asked.

“No, what?”

“They said, ‘Golly! A new river!' Get it? Gauley, golly,” she said and slapped herself on the knee.

“Hilarious, Gert. Just hilarious.”

Ten minutes later I was still driving as cautiously as ever, very proud of the fact that I had not scraped the underneath part of my car on any ridges or rocks.

“You know,” she said. “I did tell Milly that we'd be there this evening.”

“Look, Gert. Get off my back over this,” I said, slightly more hatefully than I intended. Well, actually I intended for it to be hateful, I just didn't want it to sound like I meant it to be hateful.

Finally, we made it to a clearing on the side of the mountain. It was as if somebody had come along and flattened out about an acre halfway up the mountain. Just enough space for Aunt Millicent to put her house and her chickens.

She lived in a two-story log cabin with a huge screened-in front porch. Her red Jeep Cherokee was parked in the front with mud splashed halfway up the doors and all over the tires making them brown instead of black. Two rhododendron bushes stood proudly on each side of her porch, and wind chimes twinkled from the large tree in the front yard.