The Rosewood Casket (7 page)

“Well,” said Dovey, “if anything can calm you down, it’s being outside. That hasn’t changed.”

Clayt took a deep breath. “It isn’t cold. You want to sit awhile?”

“A few minutes, I guess.” The night sounds from the woods, and the sight of the stars glittering above the mountains, made her feel more peaceful than she had for a long time. She wasn’t sure why she had been so determined to stay and help, but now wasn’t the time to talk about it. The darkness was cold and clear, and Dovey let the silence grow between them until she became aware that the night was not still or silent at all.

A bat swooped into the spotlight at one end of the barn gulping down moths as it flew past. Far off, on the ridge, she heard the cry of a bird.

“Barn owl?” she said softly.

Clayt stood still, listening with his whole body until the cry came again. “Great horned owl,” he said. “Barn owls scream or make a hissing noise. There! Hear it? A low whoo-oo—that’s a great horned. He’ll be after the rabbits tonight, when they go out courting.”

“They say it’s a sign of death—hearing an owl.”

“It is if you’re a field mouse,” said Clayt, and for the first time that day, they smiled at each other. He stopped pacing and sat beside her on the concrete step. “It’s been a long time since we talked, Dovey.”

She shivered a little. “Remember when we were kids, and we used to play until way after dark on summer nights? Catching lightning bugs in a jam jar, and playing hide-and-seek when it was too dark to even see.”

“I remember playing pioneer. I was always Daniel Boone—”

“You still are, Clayt!”

“Yeah—in my living history lectures, but it was more fun as a kid, when I could make it up as I went along. I remember how Dwayne and Garrett and I used to try to make you be an Indian princess in our game.”

“I finally went along with it, didn’t I?”

He laughed at the memory. “Sure, you did. How old were you then? Ten? You must have spent hours in the Hamelin library getting ready for that one.” He mimicked her little girl’s voice. “
All right, boys, I’m a Cherokee princess. I’m Nancy Ward!

“And then you proceeded to kill all of us, and when we cried foul, you went home and got the book, and shoved it under our noses.” He shook his head. “Sure enough, it told how she chewed bullets for her husband during the Cherokee’s war with the Creeks, and how she took up his gun after he was killed and turned the tide of battle herself. I should have kept on reading, though. You tricked us. She never did harm any whites. Protected them, even from the wrath of the Cherokees. You didn’t tell us that.”

“Of course I didn’t!” said Dovey. “I wanted to be a warrior, not a peacemaker. That’s why I picked her. You all wanted me to be Rebecca Boone, sweeping the smokehouse while you boys went off to have adventures.
‘Be careful, Dan’l,’”
she said in mocking falsetto.

In the darkness, Clayt Stargill smiled. “Nancy Ward. It was the first time I’d ever heard of her. I talk about her sometimes now in my school presentations.”

“Good. Little girls ought to have somebody to relate to besides pioneer housewives and goody two-shoes Pocahontas. What do you say about Nancy Ward?”

“Well, I’m in costume as Daniel Boone, who must have met her—they were both important people in the same place and time—so I tell them that she was my friend, and a friend to all the settlers in the western mountains. She tried to keep the peace between the Cherokees and the whites. I talk about the time she warned Fort Watauga about the coming attack planned by Dragging Canoe and how she saved Mrs. Bean from being burned at the stake, stamping out the flames herself and promising the village that if they spared this captive, Mrs. Bean would teach them how to make butter and cheese. I tell them that Nancy Ward was named the Ghighau when she was still a teenager, even though that honor is usually reserved for one very old and revered. The female students are always especially pleased about that part.”

“I hope you make it clear that women played an important role in Cherokee society and that she had real power and influence.”

“You ought to come with me, Dovey,” said Clayt. “With that dark hair of yours and a little pancake makeup to cover your Irish freckles, you’d make a great Nancy Ward. You might even be part Cherokee, who knows? I could rig you up a pioneer costume and some turkey feathers for a swan’s wing—you remember, the symbol of her authority.”

“No thanks, Clayt,” she sighed. “Maybe men don’t outgrow playacting, but women do.”

*   *   *

“Grandma Flossie, where are they taking the hounds?”

Nora Bonesteel was five years old, a big-eyed, solemn child, who watched more than she spoke. She was sitting on the back porch on a May morning, watching her grandmother peel potatoes to boil for dinner. In the soft wind Nora could smell the blossoms on the apple trees, as white as her pinafore against the green mountains beyond. She had been watching a mourning cloak butterfly drift among the clumps of purple irises in her mother’s garden beside the smokehouse, as she listened to her grandmother sing an old hymn, joining her on the chorus:
Safely walking close to thee; Let it be, dear Lord, let it be.

The dogs’ barking drowned out the harmony of old woman and child. Nora looked up to see her father and their cousin Roy heading for the dog pen beside the barn. They pulled open the wooden door in the chicken wire fence, released the yelping hounds from the enclosure, and loaded them into the back of Sam Teague’s flatbed Ford. Watching them, Nora felt afraid, and it took her a moment to sort out why. It was the silence. The men performed the tasks without speaking, expressionless. They did not laugh and talk as they usually did when they went for the hounds, nor did they wave to the womenfolk on the porch. Even though they wore boots and brush clothes, Nora decided that they weren’t fixing to go hunting. It was too late in the day. She didn’t see any rifles. She looked up at her grandmother, who was also watching the men in a grim silence far removed from the usual good humor she showed to the departing hunters. Something was wrong about this day. Nora knew not to ask if she might go along. “Where are they going?”

Grandma Flossie sighed. “They’re hunting a child, Nora,” she said. “A little girl is lost out on the mountain. They say she wandered off into the woods, and can’t find her way home again, so all the menfolk are going out with the dogs to look for her.”

“What little girl?”

“She was staying over at the Stargill farm. She was a little towheaded girl about as old as you, Nora. You haven’t seen her, have you?” Grandma Flossie spoke slowly to the child, and Nora understood that the question was meant two ways. Had Nora seen the little girl playing in the woods, and a second meaning, the secret between them—had little Nora
seen
anything that other folks weren’t likely to see? A black ribbon on a beehive, perhaps, or a mound of flowers at the church altar that didn’t turn out to be there after all when she tried to touch it. Such things had happened to Nora before, as they happened to Grandma Flossie, but nobody ever talked about these occurrences, not in the family, and never, ever to strangers. Sometimes grandmother and child would talk about things they saw, but Nora understood that this gift of Sight was a thing best kept to herself. It made folks uneasy to have a little girl seeing things that weren’t there—bad things, most of the time. The worst of it was that they would come to see these things, too, a few days or weeks later: a burned-out barn, a new grave, an empty cradle …

Did you see anything?

Nora shook her head.

“It’s a sad thing to lose a child,” said Grandma Flossie.

“Maybe Daddy and the dogs will bring her back safe.”

“It’s past two days now,” said the old woman. She raised her hand for a solemn wave as the black truck seething with hounds eased its way past them. “Nights are cold out on the mountain in May.”

“Are you telling the child about the lost youngun?” Nora’s mother stood at the screen door, frowning at the pair of them. “Now don’t go giving her nightmares! She’s moony enough as it is. She might think she’ll be taken off next.”

“I’ll stay close,” Nora promised.

Grandma Flossie turned to look at her daughter-in-law. “Nora will be all right,” she said.

“Well, of course, she will,” said Nora’s mother. “She wouldn’t be fool enough to wander off in those woods. Besides, it isn’t as if Nora was a stray, like that poor youngun at Stargill’s, with her mother deserted by one man and dumped on his kinfolks’ doorstep by the next one. If it had been me, I’d have gone north with Ashe Stargill, babies or no, instead of having to eat humble pie on the farm with that mama of his. I know they didn’t take to Luray, but they had to accept her, on account of her having their grandson, and Ashe Stargill finally up and marrying her. But I can imagine how they feel about having the other one underfoot, with times as hard as they are now. I’m not casting blame, but I’ll bet there were sighs of relief when that girl youngun ran off. Probably knew she wasn’t wanted.”

“Pray about it,” said Grandma Flossie, “but don’t scare this child here.” She nodded toward Nora, who was twisting her pinafore, and looking as if she might cry.

When her mother was no longer a shadow in the doorway, Nora leaned over to her grandmother and whispered, “If those Stargills don’t want that little girl, do you think we could find her and take her in?”

Flossie Bonesteel sighed. “I don’t think your mother would take kindly to that, Nora, but she may be right about things at the Stargill place. And the Lord knows best. Perhaps the child will be happier … this way.”

Nora heard the sorrowful tone and felt cold in the May sunshine. “Reckon what happened to her, Grandma?”

The old woman motioned for Nora to sit down beside her. She picked up another potato from the bucket and began to peel it as she talked. “I don’t rightly know,” she said softly. “But, I’ll tell you what: the Cherokees that used to live in these hills told stories about people who got lost on the mountain. They would wander away from their villages, and never be seen again. Cherokees said that some of these mountains are hollow underneath, and that a race of little people called the Nunnehi live inside—only instead of being a dark cave underground, the rocks give way to a bright, beautiful land where it is always high summer.”

“What do the little people look like?”

“I don’t know that anybody has ever seen one, and come back to tell the tale, but the Indians thought they looked like little bitty Cherokees: copper-skinned, with long black hair. I always fancied that they had pointy ears, and cat-eyes, and hair like crow feathers, black and shiny. I never wanted to meet one, though. They say that if you go off with the Nunnehi, and visit their beautiful land, you will never be happy on earth again. Especially if you eat any of their food, you can never come home. But if you leave the earth to go and live with the little people, you never grow old, either.”

“I’m glad you never went off with those little people,” said Nora. “I’d sure miss you.”

“Well, I reckon I might go one day,” said her grandmother. “They are said to be kind to those that mean no harm. Someday when my rheumatism gets too bad to stand, and my eyes get to where I can’t see my needle, and I get too tired to walk to meeting, I think I might just go calling on those little people, and stay awhile in that bright land of theirs. I’d like being young again in the summer of always. I reckon I’d miss you, too, Nora, but I wouldn’t want you grieving to see me go. They say that those who dwell with the little people are forever glad.”

“Do you think the little girl in the woods is glad?”

“Well, Nora, I think she is peaceful, and—and—that she will never be cold or hungry again. She will never grow old.” Tears glistened on the old woman’s cheeks. She brushed them away with the back of her hand, and went back to peeling potatoes.

Nora wondered why her grandmother was sad if the little girl was in such a beautiful and happy place with the little people. What a blessing never to be cold or hungry again. She put the thought out of her mind. Even when the men returned after dark that evening, penning up the muddy, exhausted hounds without a word or a smile, and ate a cold supper in silence, she did not wonder.

CHAPTER THREE

Were there a voice in the trees of the forest, it would call on you to chase away these ruthless invaders who are laying it to waste.

—SIMON GIRTY,
white adoptee of the Shawnee,
from
John Bradford’s Historical Notes on Kentucky

Even when he had no clients to chauffeur from one property to another, Frank Whitescarver spent a lot of time in his Jeep Cherokee, scouting the back roads of the county in search of suitable parcels of land. March was a good time for such expeditions. Dirt roads that had been rendered impassable by winter mud and ice were navigable again, and the still leafless trees provided a good view of the land and the vistas that could be seen from them. People these days seemed to care more about the land they could see from their property than they did about the property itself. In March the views were not blocked by foliage. March was not too bitterly cold for walks through the woods and along old logging trails to reach parcels without road frontage; and the snakes were not yet awake to prosecute trespassers into their domain.

Whitescarver tried to do his scouting in early March, so that when spring fever hit the prospective buyers, he could be ready with a good selection of properties to offer. Every spring, about the time the dogwoods bloomed and the Blue Ridge Parkway became clogged with cars from Charlotte, Knoxville, Roanoke, and all points in between, the upwardly-mobile gentlefolk of east Tennessee would start picking up the real estate brochures from the racks at Krogers and at local restaurants. They would look longingly at poetic ads for mountain land (Deer for neighbors in your own wilderness paradise … 360-degree view! Commuting distance to Johnson City, to East Tennessee State!). And they would call.

His real estate clients were mostly city people, although they would have said otherwise, and they all wanted the same thing, and would not get it, mainly because it was not available, but also because, Whitescarver knew, if he did provide them with what they asked for, they would hate it. “We want a little farm, Mr. Whitescarver,” he was told by slender blondes in earth-tone cashmere sweaters. Their faces bore an earnest glow as they spoke of the noise and confinement of suburban life, of wanting room for the children to play without fear of traffic or strangers. He supposed they had been raised watching
The Waltons
and
Little House on the Prairie
in centrally heated split-levels in Greensboro or Lexington, and they dreamed of such an idyllic existence without having the least idea what it was like to live on a farm.