The Storycatcher (6 page)

The hot, sticky air hit me full force. Three steps from the front porch I lost the contents of my stomach. I collapsed on the grass and folded my knees into my chest.

Later a shadow fell over me. “Miss Tuggle.” It was one of the twins. The sun hovered over the treetops. Soon the orange and pink of the day’s end would swish across the sky.

“Yes.”

“Mama wants to know if you’ll come sit with her for a while. She’s called Pastor and wants you to be with her when he comes.”

I sat up knowing I looked like a fool out in the front yard, but Arleen’s brother didn’t seem to care.

“Yes, of course.” I thought of the cross. “Where did Arleen get the necklace she was wearing?”

The twin shrugged. “Don’t know, Miss Tuggle. Mama asked after it too, but Arleen never gave a good answer.”

I HEARD THE ESTEEMED PASTOR
before I saw his face. “May, this is God’s will.” But his normally loud know-it-all attitude trembled slightly. Funny how he wrote off this tragedy on God. “I know it’s hard.” His words were lifeless like a frozen tree in the winter.

The man made me insane. I left Arleen’s body wrapped in fresh, clean sheets and went into the front room. Pastor Dobbins gave me a hard look but kept speaking.

“Arleen was having a bastard child, May. This is God’s judgment on her soul.”

Those lies twisted around me. “May, I need to talk to you about Arleen’s last words.” I hadn’t intended on repeating Arleen’s story, but something had to be said to counteract the horrible opinions of that man.

“What did she say, Sister Tuggle? I’m sure May wants me to hear this too.”

“I’m not your sister, Pastor Dobbins. I’m not even a member of your church.” I touched May’s shoulder. “Could we talk alone? Then you can tell anyone you want. I’m sure Pastor won’t mind waiting on the porch.”

His face clouded. “I’ll step out.” But he gave me a look to kill before he left.

May slumped down into a rocker.

I squatted in front of her. “Arleen told me she was forced to have relations with the father of the baby. She didn’t sleep with him on her own free will.”

May looked at me with a spark of life in her eyes. The mountain washed away so many good women with burdens way too big to carry. “Who was this man? I should have known. I should have.”

I tasted the name that came to me. It was gritty and refused to be swallowed. I had no proof. Only my gut. He was a man I hated just because of his judgments. That was no reason to believe he would commit a crime. “I don’t know. She didn’t get a chance to tell me.”

A board creaked on the porch.

“Tell Pastor what Arleen said. Maybe he won’t think she’s damned anymore.” May stared out the window.

“Pastor doesn’t get to decide who is damned and who isn’t. Only God has that say-so, and he knows the truth. Not my truth or yours or even our good pastor’s outside. May, Arleen was a good girl.”

She turned to me and took my hand. “But Pastor belongs to God, so he knows what is right and wrong.”

I CROSSED THE MEADOW
behind the cabin headed home to find some sleep, to put all the thoughts racing in my head to rest. That hot wind pushed me along. Each step was quicker than the last. Zach Walters came into my mind. He was Asheville’s sheriff and an old friend. I guess one could say we had been an item. Many gossiped that we were romantically involved. But that wasn’t so. I just couldn’t allow myself to
be serious. My life was on the mountain as a granny woman. His was in Asheville. Those two worlds would not come together without someone giving up what they loved most of all, but I missed our once-a-week dinners. In that moment, I wanted to talk with him as a friend.

The lantern provided a circle of light around me. The stars shone in the sky. My lantern lit her face, a Negro girl. “You got to pay attention. You be messing with fire, ma’am.” Then she was gone.

“Who are you? What do you want? Is this about Arleen?” The air tingled with the sound of wind in the trees. I hurried through the yard. My heart beat in my ears, and I had a great urge to run through the darkness before something touched my ankles. The girl looked real enough. Now I was seeing the mountain haints that I refused to believe existed. I smiled for the first time since Arleen passed.

THE HOT WIND BLEW
for three weeks without stopping. All the folks on the mountain saw it as an omen, something bad coming our way. I didn’t believe in omens, but even so, the wind unnerved me. Then one afternoon a big black cloud came rolling over the valley right at us. I heard the hail—a pelting sound that approached through the woods—before the blinding thickness took over, surrounding my cabin. I sat at my mother’s desk, under my bedroom window, writing about the most recent baby I caught, but became distracted by the thought of Faith Dobbins, who I had seen earlier in Daniels Cemetery. She was an odd young woman, and that was exactly why I liked her so much. She reminded me of how different I was at that age: all arms and legs, inside my own thoughts while others looked for husbands, made their own clothes, and cooked.

The sound of the ice vibrated on the tin roof, straight into my whole body, and all the way down into my fingers. This new addition to the house grated on my every nerve no matter the weather. It was an eyesore, to say the least. The glaring brightness on a sunny day announced to all the mountain my cabin had a brand-new roof. The horrible
tin affair came to me as payment for delivering the Hawkinses’ baby just as my old faithful roof threatened to fall in. The Hawkinses’ baby daughter was one of those infants who took her sweet time coming into the world, all red-faced and screaming when she finally arrived. So, Mr. Hawkins felt obligated to do something more than give me fresh eggs for a month. I would have preferred the eggs.

The hail made such a racket I wondered if the tin would hold, halfway wished it wouldn’t. Fall storms could blow up out of nowhere with a vengeance. But I’d felt this one coming since the day Arleen gave birth and died. And I wasn’t one to believe in such things. The folks on the mountain were a peculiar lot and lived their lives around superstitions like planting by the signs—even Mama took the planting signs serious—but not me. I never believed in the good people’s mountain magic or the punishment issued by their god. This storm was a sign. I just had no idea for what.

My plants would be pounded by the ice, but they were hardy. Some like lemon balm and yellow dock Grandmama planted when she was young and first beginning her practice. Herbs were my tools like a hammer and nails completed a carpenter. At barely thirty-five, I knew more about the human body and what made it work than some doctors with their fancy degrees. But as happy as I was, I still dreamed of going to medical school. Impossible, so I made it a practice to read every modern medicine book I could find. Some I ordered all the way from Boston and New York City. I always saw a much wider picture than just my mountain. Right before Mama died, she urged me to move away, go to a city, find a different kind of life. Caring for the sick was a selfless practice that ran a person into the ground. But it was too late by then. The time for me to leave had come and gone. Healing was my husband, my good marriage. It gave me a reason to move through life. It was my expression of love, a love that resided in the valleys, rivers, and the tall spruces that scrubbed the sky. On Black Mountain I saw what was coming at me, except for the day the storm came rolling in on us. Something dark was hidden
in the tingle of electricity, something that had been with us for a few weeks but we just ignored.

The hail lasted for about five minutes and then stopped as suddenly as it began. In the pause of complete silence, I released a breath I didn’t even know I had been holding. “Enough of that,” I whispered to the emptiness. The sound of a train rushing down some invisible track came straight for the cabin. The leaves were motionless. Sweet Gay, my gelding, was pushed against the barn wall as if he expected to be run over.

The tops of the maples, oaks, and spruces began to wave in a frenzy. Whole trees popped in half. Snap, snap, snap. Still I stood watching, hypnotized. A large limb hit the porch, and I shot out the back door, fighting the wind as I ran. The pump house roof flew over my head and smashed into a large oak tree at the edge of the woods. I pulled open the root cellar doors out back of the cabin and entered the dark coolness, safety.

The doors shuddered so hard I was sure they’d take flight. The sound of metal against metal came from every direction. The smell of fresh-cut wood filled my lungs. A sickening pressure sat in the air. All went quiet, and then rain beat on the doors. Glass shattered somewhere as I sat with my back against the canned tomatoes, squash, and beans put up for winter. Then suddenly the rain stopped and a bird sounded in the woods.

The door didn’t give. I shoved my shoulder against it and pushed with all my might. By gosh, I wouldn’t be stuck in the cellar. It opened. A large limb had fallen across the doors. Sun peeked in and out of the gray clouds. The air was cooler. The wind was gone. Sweet Gay still stood against the barn, safe. Metal glittered in the sunlight from atop some of the untouched trees. The hideous new tin roof had been peeled back and torn away. A long, crazy laugh escaped into the air. But there was no time to lose my mind. Someone might be hurt. I was the granny woman. This was the life I had chosen freely, caring for the mountain’s people.

M
E AND PASTOR CHARLES DOBBINS
was stuck to each other from the first day he stepped foot on this mountain. I was that little whisper in his ear just as he fell off to sleep, letting down his fight. I was the moan in the wind, the chill on a hot day. I was his lifelong worry. I wasn’t making every move he made because I thought highly of him. He was a devil walking around in a human body, and I’m sad to say he was considered a man of God by some. His heart was easy to read ’cause the Dobbins family had a dark streak that ran way on back to the time when I lived and breathed.

There I was in Pastor’s church when the bad storm hit. He was standing in front of the big gold cross that hung on the brown wall behind the pulpit. He’d been there all morning while that girl of his wandered around the graveyard like that be the place for a fifteen-year-old. He didn’t even notice. He wasn’t fooling most on the mountain, even if
they acted dumb. Them bruises and so-called accidents that cursed the Dobbins women proved there wasn’t no God in him, but the holy churchgoing folks in the congregation never said a word. They could have been scared of him and for good reason, ’cause he had a way of punishing those who stepped out against him. Take what happened to Dig Wilson three farms over. He pointed out Pastor was spending the church fund on his new car. Wasn’t long after that Dig’s whole family got real sick, nearly died. Pastor claimed right from the pulpit that God had given Dig and his family just what they deserved for lying, that they was proof of the wrath of God. What he didn’t tell was how he poisoned their well water. Them churchgoers had paid in a big way for playing dumb, not just Dig’s family, but the whole lot of them. They was so stupid they hadn’t figured a thing out. Yet.

The sky broke open and hail pounded the roof. And even me, who had been dead longer than this man had been alive, got a little itchy to run. Pastor’s eyes got big and his hands went to shaking and he stared at the ceiling with them big blue eyes of his like he half expected the thing to open and God’s mighty hand to reach in after him.

“God in Heaven. Is this my punishment? Am I to witness your fire and brimstone?”

Always he was searching out some punishment from God. I never bothered telling him that God didn’t have to do too much of that business ’cause folks was always sticking their own big feet right smack in the middle of the biggest troubles in the world. We was our own worst enemies.

The hail covered the grass and made me think of snow. I sure did miss snow. Since I died, I could only see it, not smell it. There wasn’t nothing in the whole world better than the scent of snow. Daddy used to tell me I was pure crazy. That snow couldn’t smell. But Mama would shoo him away and tell him to let me be with my dreams. But it was more than a dream. Snow smelled like those soft peppermint sticks that melted in my mouth on Christmas morning. One fine pink striped stick of sugar.

“Take me off this earth! I can’t live on this godforsaken mountain anymore. I need to live a new life,” he cried out.

Right then—like God was listening to him—the hail stopped. Just stopped. What came next was a black stillness. The kind that fills up a space when a soul leaves a body. I squeezed my eyes shut, as if a haint could die again. Somewhere way off came the sound of a steam train. Crack, crack, crack. Wood splitting along with a rumbling that came straight from the pit of Hell. It was bubbling over into the living world. My good man of God took him a dive right under the first pew in the women’s amen corner and stretched out on his stomach. Lord Jesus, if only his church could have seen him. Time tiptoed and Pastor stayed in his safe place. His breath went from fast to slow to fast again. He was thinking on being a boy and hiding from his daddy under a bed. I wasn’t fond of knowing that man’s thoughts, but there wasn’t nothing I could do about it.