A Day in Mossy Creek Read online

  I paced and watched the sunrise from Jeb’s favorite window in his study. The day was blue and crisp, a perfect winter morning in January, the kind where the sunlight feels like golden crystals on your skin. A mere trickle of freezing, blue-golden air seeping under a window sash was usually enough to erase my worries and boost my mood like a whiff of pure oxygen. My husband had loved weather like this. Hibernation time, he liked to call it, looking at me with a gleam in his eye. We’d dive back into bed. Naked, under warm heirloom quilts, we did everything but hibernate. And so I cherished the memories.

  But on this day I stood frowning, a steaming cup of gourmet coffee in hand, Stevie Nicks on my CD player, my silk robe bound around me. A human tourniquet of impatience. Rose Top Mountain loomed in the distance, gray-green and majestic. More than a thousand acres of woodland flow from its lower ridges to the edge of the farm’s property. I couldn’t see the Sitting Tree at its base. But the tree was there, nevertheless. A spectral monument, always in my thoughts.

  I clenched my coffee mug, debated adding a slug of bourbon to it, then stiffened my spine and refused. Keep staring out this window as penance, you punked mayor. Look at the view, and don’t flinch from the past, the present, or the future.

  From Jeb’s favorite window I could see the entire lovely expanse of the farm’s red barns, weathered sheds, and rolling pastures. My herd of caramel-colored Jersey milk cows ambled toward the main dairy barn, called by the lure of sweet grain for breakfast and a friendly pat on the rump, not to mention a pleasant massage from the milking machines. The dairy at Hamilton Farm is run by old Ben Howell, a flatlander from Florida who, along with his wife, Sadie, managed the farm’s dairy operation since I was a girl. When I look out my windows, I see my family’s history. And my own.

  Beyond the cow pasture the rolling land climbs in a broad, gentle swell of brown winter grass covered in glittering frost. For over 150 years my forebears had grown high-protein wheat on that acreage, for hay to feed the cows. I’d kept up the tradition faithfully.

  Until now. Now rows of baby grape plants twined their naked winter vines along the wires of sturdy trellises on that land. I’ve cultivated a good ten acres in vineyard over the past few years. With any luck I’ll get the vines’ first big harvest by summer. Mom-and-pop wineries are springing up all over north Georgia, and I’ve contracted with one to distill the debut batch of wine from my grapes. Next year I’ll make the wine myself. I’ve had plans drawn up for a woodsy, Craftsman-style lodge to house the equipment, a wine cellar, and a tasting room. Wolfman Washington, my fellow Foo Clubber and bulldozer operator, just finished clearing and grading a site on a ridge nearby. When the winery building is finished, my guests—and eventually, my customers—will be able to stand on the winery’s veranda, sipping a Jeb Walker chardonnay or a Jeb Walker merlot while they look out over the vineyards, toward Rose Top Mountain and the Sitting Tree.

  You heard right. Jeb Walker wine. From the Walker Winery at Hamilton Farm. I’ve already had a logo drawn up. I’ve already got stationary and business cards. The logo will be an outline of the farm’s famous grain silo in rich hunter green with Jeb’s initials stamped over the silo in gold. It’s classic but friendly. Unforgettable. Like the man who inspired it.

  You see, Jeb always wanted to plant a vineyard. Back then, everyone pooh-poohed his daydream, myself included. We chortled at his idea of growing decent wine grapes in Mossy Creek. We thought good wine only came from two places: France and California. Jeb, however, never wavered. “One day,” he always said, “I’m going to cover the hill outside my study in grape vines, and I’m going to pick the grapes and stomp them with my own feet and age the juice in oak barrels, and when Ida and I are old we’ll sit on the back veranda and drink that vintage wine. We’ll have the last laugh.”

  He never got to plant those grapes. He never got to grow old. I’ll never get to have that glass of wine on the veranda with him beside me. But Jeb will get the last laugh. I’ll make sure of that.

  I curled my fist around my morning coffee mug and raised the mug in a salute to Rose Top Mountain and the Sitting Tree. “Nobody’s going to build an amusement park over there,” I swore aloud. “Nobody’s going to ruin the view from Jeb’s vineyard.” I took a deep swig of coffee.

  When my cell phone rang (it plays the opening bars of Stevie Nicks’ Dreams) I nearly spit French roast on Jeb’s mahogany desk. I hurriedly fished around in my robe’s pockets until I found the tiny phone. There’s something ignoble about trying to field an important call on a phone the size of a matchbox.

  “Hope?” I yelled into thin air as I slapped the entire phone to one ear. “What did you find—besides hundred-year-old cockroach skeletons and dirty drawings of women in corsets.”

  Hope hooted. “It’s here! Just like Cousin Farley wrote in that ancient diary you found! Behind the wallboard in the attic, right where he said he put it for safekeeping after Great Aunt Belinda died—stuffed between the pages of the ladies’ lingerie section of a 1902 Sears and Roebuck catalog!”

  I hooted in return. God bless our great aunt’s son—our long-dead mutual cousin, Farley—and his fetish for busty Victorian babes wearing whalebone. “Hurry home,” I told Hope. “I’m calling Ingrid. We’ll pick you up at Bailey Mill in a few hours.”

  “Where are we going?”

  I chuckled fiendishly. My New Year’s resolution—to stay out of trouble—floated past like a small, resigned angel, waving goodbye. “We’re driving down to Atlanta to visit the governor. He’s got a meeting scheduled with the Whoopee Arcade people this afternoon. Perfect timing.” I paused, relishing the image of my pompous nephew roasting on a slow spit of defeat. “Ham’s about to get punked.”

  WMOS Radio

  “The Voice of the Creek”

  Good morning, Mossy Creek! This is Bert Lyman, as always, of WMOS-FM and its sister station, WMOS-TV, local cable access channel 22, bringing you breaking news. Flash! The streets of downtown Mossy Creek are finally safe again. The notorious Miss Irene, age 93, has been captured. No word yet on whether police chief Amos Royden ended her wild spree by running her off the sidewalk, or whether he resorted to shooting the tires off her scooter. More news as we get it. Stay tuned!

  Chapter 2

  Teach a woman to drive, and you give her the world. Teach an old woman to drive a scooter, and you give the world a major scare.

  Melvin and Miss Irene Go to Wal-Mart

  THERE WAS SOMETHING about that Saturday that promised trouble. You know, like the feeling you get that makes you want to brush off the centipede crawling up your backbone. For months I had feared it would come to this, starting way back when Melvin called me to tell me that he was “taking Miss Irene to Wal-Mart.”

  My name is Casey Blackshear. I’m married to Hank, the local veterinarian and Mossy Creek town councilman. Miss Irene is Hank’s great aunt, three times widowed, with no children. In all fairness, I have to say that all three of her husbands adored her. Unfortunately, being a wife was the only thing she excelled at.

  Husband number three died twenty years ago. Now she’s ninety-three and a diva, as much as a diva can be, who, except for a church-organized tour to Niagara Falls, hasn’t been out of Bigelow County since she turned seventy-five. Until two years ago, she and her three cousins, all widows, lived in the same trailer court down in Bigelow—in separate trailers, of course.

  They got up each morning promptly at 7:15, made their beds, brushed their teeth, combed their tightly-curled perms and dressed, always with ear bobs (clip-ons of course) and lipstick. Each ate a bowl of cereal—fiber for their systems—and drank one-half cup of prune juice and one cup of decaffeinated coffee. Then they washed the dishes and waited for someone to come by or call.

  Most days someone did. Of course the cousins went to prayer meeting on Wednesday night, shopped at the Bigelow Ingles on Friday, went out to eat on Saturday night, and went to
Sunday School and church on Sunday, with the youngest cousin driving. Then Aunt Irene fell and broke her good hip; she’d already done a job on the other one. That’s when the Bigelow cousins pronounced with greatly exaggerated regret that they could no longer care for Irene since they were in their eighties and needed looking after themselves. Against her wishes, and Hank’s, we brought her to the assisted living section of Magnolia Manor, here in Mossy Creek.

  I should now explain about Melvin. He was Hank’s best boyhood friend, becoming even closer after he was wounded in Desert Storm and sent home. Melvin’s parents had died by then, and he had no other family. Hank offered him a job, and Melvin took it. Then Melvin built himself a one-room apartment at the end of the clinic, where he lives now.

  Since then he’s been our self-appointed keeper, handyman, kennel man, and veterinary assistant when Hank has to make house calls. And every Saturday he looks in on Ed Brady, a local senior citizen. Ed is a crusty old-timer who is just as set in his ways as Aunt Irene. Doesn’t seem to bother Melvin, who just ignores their preferences and makes them do what they need to do, when nobody else can.

  Since I’m in a wheelchair, Melvin thinks he has to make sure that my daughter, Li, and I are always safe. He doesn’t need to, but we humor him by agreeing. When Aunt Irene came to Mossy Creek, Melvin just extended his bodyguarding services to her, whether she wanted them or not.

  Melvin shaves his head. The color of warm cocoa, he looks like a dark-chocolate Mr. Clean. He’s a handsome man, a good man. Everybody loves Melvin, except Aunt Irene. At first, she didn’t consider it proper to ride around Mossy Creek with a black man driving her car. No amount of discussion changed her mind. Her racism embarrassed us, but we were stuck.

  Didn’t bother Melvin. He went out and rented Driving Miss Daisy, and we had movie night. After the movie, he brought out his new chauffeur’s cap and announced that he’d drive and Irene could sit in the back. Nobody else in Mossy Creek had a chauffeur.

  That appealed to her, but there was another problem. Aunt Irene didn’t want anybody driving her car except herself or me. The obvious problem here was that, as drivers, neither of us could use our legs—she of the broken hips and me of the auto accident that left me in a wheelchair. Hank and I tried to get her to sell the car, but she refused. She fully intended to drive the car herself—after her hip healed. We realized that dream was important and stopped nagging her.

  The state of Georgia didn’t help our “Ground Miss Irene” cause. When it came time to renew her driver’s license, the license bureau gave her a new one—good for another five years—without so much as a question, despite her tottering along on a walker.

  She can no longer read street signs, but the bureau never even tested her eyes. To make matters worse, she forgets how to get where she is going in Bigelow and she’s never learned the streets in Mossy Creek. At least she’s confined to Magnolia Manor unless someone takes her out—which is more than you could say about Ed before he had his cataract surgery. You remember? After Chief Royden took his license, Ed drove his tractor into town and directly into Mossy Creek—the actual creek—thanks to an encounter with Ham Bigelow’s limo.

  Still, Aunt Irene managed to move about enough to keep her own battery charged; her Pontiac wasn’t so lucky. Finally, Hank told her that the car needed to be driven to keep its battery charged and its parts working. He didn’t have time to drive it, and I couldn’t. Reluctantly, she agreed to let Melvin drive the Pontiac at least once a month.

  Dutifully, he drove it over to Magnolia Manor every week. She’d walk out to the car and sit in the back seat while Melvin cranked the engine. But she continued to refuse his offer to take her for a ride.

  Until one weekday.

  I was at the clinic. Melvin called on his cell phone to tell me that he wouldn’t be back for a while. He and Miss Irene were going to Wal-Mart.

  Now you understand, there is no Wal-Mart in Mossy Creek. They had to go down to Bigelow. I didn’t ask what they were shopping for. I just told him to drive carefully, glad that I didn’t have to accompany them. Taking Aunt Irene anywhere means we park in a handicap area, Hank goes into the establishment and finds a store wheelchair, and he pushes her around while I drive my motorized scooter.

  On that day, I expected Aunt Irene and Melvin to be back in a couple of hours. That estimate gave them thirty minutes to Bigelow and thirty minutes back, and an hour to do whatever they were doing. Two hours turned into three, and I began to worry. Finally Melvin drove into the clinic parking area at three o’clock. He parked and locked the car and came into the house, beaming from ear to ear.

  “You’re not gonna believe it, Casey, but Miss Irene drove one of those electric scooters all over Wal-Mart.”

  I was stunned. We’d tried to get her into one of the electric chairs for months. She’d refused. She always said firmly that she was too old to learn how to drive one of those things.

  “How’d you manage that?’ I asked.

  “Well, they were out of regular wheelchairs and I just told her she was going to learn how. If she could drive a car, she could drive a scooter. I told her she could even get her own scooter and drive it on the sidewalks from Magnolia Manor to church. The idea of being able to go to church by herself did the trick.”

  “Melvin, I’m amazed.”

  “Me, too. We turned the scooter on, and I walked beside her and cleared the way until she got the hang of it.” He smiled. “She didn’t run over but one lady. That lady saw us coming and just stood there. Miss Irene panicked and pinned her to the cashier’s counter before I could pry her fingers off the accelerator.”

  “Oh, Melvin, was the woman hurt?”

  “Heck, no. Besides, wouldn’t have mattered. We were in the pharmacy.”

  “So what did Irene buy?”

  “Nothing. The other ladies at the home have started going to Wal-Mart every week, but Miss Irene doesn’t want to ride on that little bus with them. She just wasn’t gonna let those other ladies have anything on her. So we not only went to Wal-Mart, we went them one better.”

  “I’m afraid to ask. What did you do?”

  “We went to lunch at the Bigelow Cafeteria. That’s what took so long. I got the cafeteria wheelchair for her, and rolled her up and down the line first to see what her choices were, then we had to go back and fill up her plate. Do you know how many different things they offer there? I counted thirty dishes, not including the salad bar, the pizza bar and the dessert bar. She had to have one little spoonful of everything. Apple season in Mossy Creek doesn’t create a traffic jam like we did in the Bigelow Cafeteria. Good thing it wasn’t on the weekend.”

  I was stunned. For six months, Hank’s great-aunt had refused to allow Melvin to drive her around. Now they were having lunch together. I couldn’t wait to tell Hank. He rolled on the floor laughing. That was before we realized that Melvin had created a monster.

  IF AN ELECTRIC scooter worked at Wal-Mart, it would work in Mossy Creek. Aunt Irene and Melvin put their heads together and ordered a scooter advertised in the AARP magazine. It would go anywhere, and it did.

  Last summer, Aunt Irene became the terror of Mossy Creek, beeping her horn and zipping along the sidewalks, sending both residents and tourists fleeing into the street. She was a pinball gone amuck. Mossy Creek Drugs and Sundries sent her flowers in appreciation of the business her collisions sent to them.

  Melvin and the maintenance man at Magnolia Manor, Bunkin Brown, concocted an umbrella stand on the back of the seat, which shielded Aunt Irene from the rain and the sun. So on a cool morning in autumn, Aunt Irene was out and about, enjoying her hobby: hot-rodding.

  And Amos busted her.

  “Miss Irene,” our police chief said politely, “Can you slow that thing down enough that I can walk along with you?”

  “Well, I can, but I was heading for the Hamilton Inn to have lunch
. If I hurry I can get there before Millicent Hart Lavender and her group of old harpies.”

  “Miss Irene,” Amos said, “we have to talk.”

  “Well, make it fast,” she said, blowing her horn as she swerved to miss Win Allen, who jumped out of the way so quickly he dropped the five-gallon container of stew he was about to load in his Bubba Rice Catering van. Dwight Truman, on his newest racing bike, hit the stew head-on.

  Dwight and his bike landed in the arms of some big azaleas. Win’s stew seeped from the broken plastic container, making a steaming, gumbo-ish puddle on the street.

  Miss Irene never even slowed down.

  Amos jogged along beside her. “Tell me the truth. During World War Two, you were trained to drive a tank.”

  “Don’t be sassy to your elders! It’s about time you did something about these rude pedestrians. They can see my handicapped tag hanging from my handlebars.”

  “Miss Irene,” Amos explained patiently, still jogging, “it’s not the pedestrians. It’s your driving that’s causing concern.”

  “I’m a very good driver, Amos. I haven’t hit anyone since my trial run at Wal-Mart. And that woman had plenty of time to get out of the way.”

  “You haven’t hit anyone because everybody in Mossy Creek knows to get out of your way. You drive too fast and you expect your horn and your handicapped sticker to clear a path for you.”

  “I certainly do. I’ve done a little research. The handicapped vehicles have the right away.”

  “Only when you’re parking. And that’s what I’m going to have to do with your scooter. Park it. Permanently. Unless you slow down and show your fellow citizens some courtesy, I’m going to have to impound your vehicle.”