A Misty Mourning (2 page)

Now that I thought about it, the fact that I was pregnant was probably why Rudy was being overconcerned about my trip to West Virginia. He's just so darn cute.

“I don't understand why you have to go all the way to West Virginia, Torie,” he said. “Why can't this be done over the phone? Or over the Internet?”

We'd just gotten Internet access at home and suddenly Rudy was a computer expert. He talked about things like modems, DNS, HTML, and jpegs. Is it me or do those things sound like exotic communicable diseases? Maybe everything can be done over the Internet, but does it
have
to be?

I'd been fighting technology tooth and nail. That's me, Torie O'Shea, confirmed cavewoman. I have Internet access at my office at the Gaheimer House, because of all the genealogy that I do for the historical society. I have no idea how any of it actually works, mind you. It comes in handy, I'll admit, but I really miss the written letter or a voice on the other end of the line.

“Well, Rudy. I guess maybe this could be done over the computer. But we're dealing with a one-hundred-and-one-year-old woman. There are some people who still do things the old-fashioned way, thank God. At any rate, she requested my presence for the reading of her will and I'm going,” I said.

“Why?” he asked. “It's not like she's related to you.”

“She was best friends with my grandmother's mother,” I said. “That's all I know. Maybe she has something that belonged to my great-grandmother and she wants to make sure that I get it.”

He looked at me peculiarly. “Yes, but she's not even dead yet. She's having a reading of her will and she's not dead. If you want my opinion, that is weird.” I found it a little bizarre myself, but what would it hurt for me to go? My grandmother hadn't been back to her native West Virginia since 1986. I wanted her to see it again. She was eighty-two now and you just never knew. Besides, I knew this would be a real bonding trip for us.

Rudy carried my suitcase for me down the stairs and into the living room where my grandmother sat waiting. She was early, as usual. Gertrude Crookshank, my grandmother, sat with her cane in one hand and her extremely large black vinyl purse in the other. I knew for a fact that the purse contained a wallet, a photo carrier, and a ton of Kleenex. Why she needed a purse that big for those few items, I'll never know.

Her hair was totally white now, her brown eyes appearing much darker because of it. Her cheekbones were high and wide, and she had absolutely beautiful skin. It was barely wrinkled, which she credited to good genes and Ponds cold cream.

“You ready, Gert?” I asked her. I have always called her Gert or Granny Gert.

“As long as I can stop and get some coffee, I'll be fine,” she answered.

Rudy carried my suitcase and various other canvas bags, a cooler, and my grandmother's things out to the car while I said good-bye to my daughters. Rachel, who is nine and counting down the days,
months, and years until she will be a teenager, was awake and waiting for me to come into the room. On the other hand, Mary, who would be six this fall, was snoring away.

“Don't let Granny get you into trouble,” Rachel said to me. Her long straight brownish hair was matted to one side of her head and sticking straight out on the other.

“I won't,” I said and kissed her on the forehead. “Try not to fight with your sister.”

She rolled her eyes heavenward. “You tell
her
that,” she said and pointed to Mary, who was both snoring and drooling at the same time.

It bothered me that my daughters had reached the stage of hating each other. Well, Mary actually adored Rachel; Rachel hated Mary, which made Mary defensive and
act
like she hated Rachel. I was an only child. I hadn't had this problem.

I sat on Mary's bed and shook her shoulder. “Mare,” I said. “Wake up. Mommy's leaving.” Now, normally Mary would kick and scream, pull the covers over her head, and demand to sleep just a few more minutes, but she knew I was leaving for a week so she sat straight up in bed. Bob Marley had nothing on this kid; her curly blond hair stuck out like somebody had sent her to bed with wet dreadlocks.

“Be good,” I said and kissed her.

Sleepy green eyes tried their darnedest to open. Finally, she just gave up, nodded her head up and down, and gave me a big hug. I'd said good-bye to them last night in case they weren't up when I left this morning, but I couldn't actually leave without saying it to them again.

With that, both girls snuggled back into bed—Mary flopped back into bed—and I closed my eyes for a second to burn that vision in my memory.

When I returned to the living room, my mother was there saying good-bye to her mother. My mother, who was wheelchair-bound,
was serenely beautiful, with large, dark eyes and a perfectly oval face.

“Be good,” my mother said to me. “Don't give your grandmother a hard time.”

Wasn't that a variation of what I'd just said to my girls? Funny how that stuff gets recycled.

My mother was marrying the local sheriff, Colin Brooke, at the beginning of August, about two weeks before I was due. I was her matron of honor and still adjusting to the fact that she would be moving out of my house when the nuptials took place.

“Me, give her a hard time?” I asked. “Tell
her
to be good to me.”

I kissed my mother good-bye and then came Rudy. He wouldn't settle for just a kiss good-bye in the living room. He had to walk me out to the car, help my grandmother get in it, and then kiss me once again.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you, too.”

With that, I got in the car and felt that little bubble of excitement in my stomach I always feel when I'm getting ready to make a long trip. As I pulled out of the driveway Rudy yelled, “Hurry home! Call me. Take good care of my son!”

He patted his belly, so that I knew he meant the baby I was carrying. Like I wouldn't know? We didn't know if it was a boy or a girl, but Rudy thought as long as he called it a boy, it would be.

I honked as I pulled away, watching Rudy wave through my rearview mirror.

L
et me say for the record that “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” is no fun with somebody who can't remember which bottle you're on.

Three fast-food stops, sixteen bathroom breaks, four unfinished conversations, one irritating rendition of “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer,” and twelve hours after I left Rudy standing in the driveway, we pulled up in front of the Panther Run Boardinghouse in central West Virginia. I'll be honest and say that I hadn't thought I was going to make it. My grandmother had this annoying habit of not finishing her sentences until about seven sentences later, once she'd thought of how it was supposed to end, and it was up to me to figure out which sentence went with which ending. Flying would have been much faster, but I have a huge fear of flying, and I'm just certain that in some twisted act of revenge, God will crash the plane while I'm on the toilet. When I do fly, I don't use the toilet. So, not an option in my current state.

Gert and I both looked up at the boardinghouse, nestled into a mountainside as if somehow it was molded into the mountain. To the left and the right of the house were brilliant green pastures that
narrowed as the mountains closed in upon the postcard valley. A two-lane road ran in front of the boardinghouse, and the Gauley River ran in front of that. On the other side of the river were gently sloped mountains plunging into the river.

I loved these mountains. I loved the entire Appalachian range from Alabama to Maine. They were comfortable mountains, like a well-used baseball glove. Soft, smooth, gentle slopes seemed to wedge themselves snugly into the land around them.

The boardinghouse, on the other hand, was not nearly so pleasing to the eye. It was a large two-story building with what looked like an attic in the center above the second story. There was dingy white latticework, about three feet high, all the way around the porch of both floors. The floor of the porch was a slate-blue, as was the trim on all the windows. The building itself was supposed to be white, but the paint was so old that it gave the building an overall grey look. In the center of the building, below the pointed roof, was a white latticework star.

The front steps were cracked and leaned to one side and the screens on the windows and doors were so rusty that you couldn't see through them. The fact that it was early evening and the sun was almost behind the mountain that sat directly behind the boardinghouse added to the overall dingy grey appearance of the building.

“Gee,” I said. “Does this look anything like what you remember?”

My grandmother smiled faintly. “Yeah,” she said. “Needs some work, but it's the same place.”

My grandmother had actually worked at this boardinghouse when it was owned by “the company.” Meaning, the Panther Run Coal Company, during the late twenties and early thirties. She was a small girl at the time, but I remember her vivid tales of having to get up at three in the morning to fix the coal miners their breakfasts and pack their pail lunches. Then she had to go on to school after that! If somebody woke my girls up at three in the morning for anything, you'd have certified zombies on your hands.

Gert and I got out of the car and stretched. My back was killing me. It felt like it had a horse sitting on it. It must have been a dead horse, because the pain hadn't let up for about a month now.

I opened the trunk of the car to get the suitcases out just as a high-pitched scream erupted from somewhere within the building. Gert gave a little jump, as did I. The noise got louder and louder until it burst through the front door of the boardinghouse. A teenage girl ran out of the building to the edge of the porch and jumped over the latticework into the yard. About ten seconds later came an older man, probably about seventy, who thrust through the door, down the steps, and around the boardinghouse after her.

Gert gave me a quizzical look. I shrugged.

Just as we made it to the steps with our suitcases, the teenager jumped up into the air and over the latticework on the opposite end of the porch. Unfortunately, her thonged foot became hooked on the lattice railing and she went splat on her stomach onto the porch floor.

The seventy-year-old man came around the boardinghouse now, huffing and puffing. He stopped at the steps, bent over at the knees catching his breath, right in front of us. His glasses came tumbling out of his shirt pocket and fell onto the steps.

“Oh, let me get that,” I said and stepped up to help him.

The teenage girl had now come to her feet. She stood up, tears running down her face. “You can't have it,” she said to the older man.

“I'm your grandpa, and you'll do as I say. Now give me that ring!” he demanded.

“No!” she shouted, stomped her foot and reached for her nose. “If I'm your granddaughter without my nose ring, then I'm your granddaughter with my nose ring. I won't take it out! You can't have it.”

“The devil's work,” the man said. “What will your great-grandma say when she sees it?”

By this point, Gert and I were standing on the steps. I'd given the man his glasses case, which he took as if I was invisible, and I
couldn't help but stare at the poor teenage girl. By the amount of tears she had shed, it was obvious that her heart was broken. She wore those wonders of all retro wonders, faded bell-bottom jeans, a tie-dyed shirt, a hemp bracelet and choker, and a big silver nose ring. Her hair was nearly to her butt, bright strawberry-red, with little braids pulled back from her temples.

“Granny has already seen'it,” she hissed at her grandfather. “What do you care? She'll be dead soon anyway. Isn't that what you said?”

“Excuse me,” I interrupted. Both the man and his granddaughter actually looked at me for the first time. “This is the Panther Run Boardinghouse, correct?”

“Yes,” the man said. “Who might you be?”

“Oh, I'm Torie O'Shea, and this is my grandmother Gertrude Crookshank—” I didn't get to finish my sentence. The man let out a whoop and a holler, and went over to my grandmother and squeezed the daylights out of her with a big bear hug.

“Lordy, Gertie Crookshank!” he said. He then turned to me. “Of course, she was Gertie Seaborne when I ran with her.”

My grandmother steadied herself with her cane and studied the man closely. “Well, Lafayette Hart, you old geezer.”

“You look as pretty as the day Sam Crookshank ran off into the mountains with you,” he said.

“Ran off into the mountains?” I asked. Sam Crookshank was my grandfather, Gert's ex-husband. “Gert, what is he talking about?”

“That Sam,” the man went on. “Now he knew what he wanted in a woman. And none of them simpering misses stoked his far, if you know what I mean.”

“Far?” I asked.

“Fire,” my grandmother said.

“Oh, fire. Of course.”

“Gertie Seaborne sure stoked it aplenty,” Lafayette said and winked at my grandmother.

“That's nice,” I said. It was no surprise to me that the teenage
girl had taken this opportune moment to run into the boarding-house and away from her grandfather. I was wanting to do the same thing.

“Can we go inside?” I asked. “I have a headache.”

“Why of course,” he said. “Let me get them bags for you. You shouldn't be carrying them heavy bags in your condition.”

I really had a headache. The dead horse had moved to my head.