Coming Home (Norris Lake Series) (3 page)

We
half-heartedly tried to make it work when I moved back to Knoxville for my final semester at the University of Tennessee.  I had a condo about three miles from campus across from the Peninsula Insane Asylum.  Ben was working at the Half Shell which was an oyster bar on Kingston Pike.  I came into the Half Shell one night to see him and he broke the news to me.  He wanted to date other people.  I was upset and stormed out of the bar vowing to marry the first man who asked me. 

I went from there to a bar where I met a man in a navy uniform.  He looked at me across the bar and before I knew it he was standing at my elbow wanting me to dance with him.  He was 6’4” with dark hair, blue eyes, and devastatingly good looks.  Dominic asked me to go home with him and I did him one better.  I took him home with me to my condo.  He stayed well into the early hours of the morning. 

It was a Friday and I suggested that we go to Gatlinburg for the weekend.  We spent an ideal weekend walking the streets of Gatlinburg and looking through the shops then retreated back to the chalet for more sex – sex in each bedroom, on the deck and several times in the hot tub.  None of it was as heart wrenching as with Ben, but Dominic was beautiful like a Greek god and it was a way to forget that my heart was breaking.  I didn’t talk to Ben once during the weekend. 

After the good times were over, Dominic and I went back to my condo, the one that Ben and I
had once shared.  Ben had been looking for me and realized that I was gone.  He had gathered his things, the clothes and some of the furniture and left.  I cried myself to sleep shouting to myself “good riddance.”  He didn’t want me and gone were all of my stupid girlish fantasies. 

Years later I heard that he had become a Blackhawk pilot and was deployed to the middle east.   I was happy he’d achieved his dreams.  Six months after that, I saw one of his friends at a party and heard he’d died in a chopper crash.  A part of me died, just like my dreams.  I never spoke of him again, but thought of him often, wondering what my life would have been like had fate treated us differently. 

Chapter
2

Dear Diary,

It’s cold today.  Grandmother says the clouds look like snow but father says that the signs aren’t right yet. Grandfather passed away two weeks ago and I miss him very much.  He gave me this journal for my birthday last month but I hadn’t yet started writing in it.  Before he died he asked me to write down our family’s history and the history of our village so my children will remember where we came from.  It really didn’t seem important until Grandfather died. Now it seems important because I didn’t pay attention to him and take him seriously.  This is almost a way to make it up to him.  No one knows where our ancestors came from originally; not really.  Grandfather says we are different than other people and that other people saw that we were different so we were forced to move farther and farther into the deep, unsettled areas of the country time after time.  It wasn’t the way we looked but our beliefs that set us apart.  Grandfather talked about the time that the village packed the contents of their houses in the dark silence of the night and moved from Salem along the great river.  At one time some of our ancestors were even burned at the stake and said to be witches.  Of course that isn’t true.  At least I haven’t ever seen a witch.  Our ancestors came to the new world along with thousands of others in search of religious freedom and the promise of prosperity in the green lands of the Americas.  They found the existing communities in the north wrought with the same type of religious chains. Stodgy, tightlipped preachers still thought along the narrow lines of fire, brimstone and an Anglo-Saxon puritan lifestyle.  In America there were still chains, but of a different kind.  So they moved south, following the sun’s warmth to the tall Appalachian mountains of east Tennessee.  Grandfather talked too about times when he was little.  He watched the tall men who had long black hair and stood so proud come talk to the elders of the village.  The men spoke a strange language with their hands and helped us learn how to survive during the harsh winter snows.  I miss grandfather especially today when it is cold outside and I think of all of those times we sat in front of the fire and listened to him read from the Bible.  And the sixth angel poured out his vial upon the great river...,”
she read softly to the child at her knee.  A sharp knock sounded on the door.  Placing the book on the low wooden table, she stepped back into the darkened hall pulling the door closed. 

“You stay there, boy,” she said gently and turned the key in the lock. 

On the stooped front porch the deputy knocked again loudly, twisting the door knob only to find the door securely locked. 

"Mrs. Connellson, are you in there? This is Sheriff Kane. I need to talk to you."  He paused a moment listening for the sound of movement from inside the house.  "It’s important that I talk to you Mrs. Connellson.  You can’t keep going on like this forever.  You know why I am here,” he called and waited again.  “The eviction is final and you are going to have to leave."  He walked across the sagging wooden porch and peered through a dirty window looking into the parlor for any sight of life. 

He hadn’t wanted to drive all the way out in the hollow to make this visit but Mrs. Connellson never came into town, living without any of the modern conveniences like electricity or running water.  It was foolish since the Connellson property sat smack dab in the middle of some well-to-do old family summer homes that lay along the bank of the river. 

Mrs. Connellson was a practically a hermit whose husband had died years ago, leaving the old woman alone to fend for herself, no family, no friends.  There had been rumors of a daughter and a child a long time ago, but no one remembered seeing either of them for several years. 

It was just his luck that Mr. Tarlington, a large gray haired man, who was both wealthy and politically well-connected, was both Mrs. Connellson’s neighbor and a prominent leader of the wealthy summer crowd had bought much of the surrounding land to hunt wild boar, deer and black bear.  Sheriff Kane knew that Mr. Tarlington had pulled the right strings to get rid of Mrs. Connellson.  Tarlington had paid the back taxes on Mrs. Connellson’s property and had found a way to acquire her land to add to his vast holdings.  There were rumors that Tarlington intended to build a private hunting lodge on this spot to entertain his political friends. 

Luckily for the sheriff, Tarlington spent most of his time between Knoxville and Nashville.  Tarlington’s son, Robert, on the other hand owned a trucking company in the nearby town of Clinton.  The trucking company was growing and Tarlington, Jr. had branched out into construction buying up land every chance he got.  The Tarlington’s were ready to build their trendy lodge and had a design for a posh planned neighborhood nearby to replace outdated this dwelling. 

The sheriff shook his head sadly.  It was too bad that the rich were able to push others around at will, but then again it had always been that way and always would be.  He’d been living around these parts for a good longtime, moving from Charlotte, North Carolina with his parents when he was a teenager, so his father could work for the Tennessee Valley Authority, as it grew, producing power for towns all over the southeast.  Now years later, he owned the local hardware store and acted as the town’s only source of the law.  Kane had a wife, a nine-year old daughter, a seven-year old son, and a new baby, so didn’t have the luxury to just walk away from tasks that brought a bad taste to his mouth. 

He took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his brow.  He wondered what his wife, Marie, was doing now; probably fixing the kids’ lunch.  As a shock of grayish brown hair fell across his eyes, he squinted through the second window into the house’s front darkened room.  The ramshackle farm house was built of graying brown wood that had seen better days. Two old red brick chimneys looked like bookends against the wood with a rusted tin roof atop the entire structure. 

The area around the house was worn bare as if its occupants never strayed too far.  A slanting wood building with a crescent moon on the door, built of the same weathered wood, stood about a hundred feet from the back of the house with a large garden full of ripe vegetables growing nearby.  He guessed that the house had been built back around the time of the civil war.  It had probably been a slave master’s house for one of the old southern mansions that lay a few miles away. 

Inside the house, the woman shuffled from the front door back to stand quiet guard over the basement door.  The sheriff turned and stood on the porch looking out at the yard. 

"Mrs. Connellson,” he yelled.  "I am leaving you these papers.  You read them and I’ll be back this evening to help you move.  Get your things together and Mrs. Connellson, I ‘m sorry about this.  I stalled as long as I could, but I’m afraid even I can’t stop the eviction this time,” he spoke loudly talking to the air.  He felt a little foolish, but was confident that he had heard some sounds inside the house. 

As he walked back to his car, he shook his head.  He hated this part of the job, throwing an old woman out of her home. Climbing into the Ford Bronco, he swore under his breath, “Damn that Tarlington to hell.  I hope
someday he faces the same threat”.  As the engine coughed to life and he rolled forward down the long overgrown drive back to town. 

She leaned against the wall of the hallway as the car left and heaved a
sigh of relief. It felt as if it was the first breath she had taken in the long minutes that the sheriff had stood outside her door.  Her chest hurt and she didn’t know if it was the lack of breath or her heart aching with despair.   The time she’d stolen to stay in the house was but a brief reprieve, but maybe it would be enough.  

Turning to the basement door, she twisted the key and called softly into the darkness of the deep hole that had been dug out as a root cellar. 

"Come out there’s nothing to be afraid of now."  She felt something sharp against the palm of her hand and then an intense pain as sharp teeth grazed the meaty part of her palm. 

"Boy, stop it!" she gasped in a sharp hard tone.  Putting both arms around the child she half carried the struggling form towards the kitchen at the back of the house.  In the distance across the lake she heard the sound of voices echoing against the late afternoon clouds.  The form twisted out of her grasp scampering to return to the safety of the cellar. 

"Don’t be afraid.  They are far away on the point across the lake,” she said to the child as if he could understand her.  She’d only ever called him boy, not bothering to name the child who was the spawn of Satan and her curse to bear.  He couldn’t hear her and had never spoken a word.

“Don’t worry, boy,” she said listening to the sounds of the men who hunted in the vast acreage nearby or maybe it was a group of boys who she’d often heard laughing on the point across the lake.   The old woman reached out and touched her hand to a bare shoulder watching as a clear string of drool dripped from the corner of the child’s mouth. 

Under her breath she cursed the sheriff and the townspeople. "You will all pay” she said quietly.  “I will curse you with my last breath and then you will know the revenge of killing God’s children.  You will know the pain and suffering of the loss of your own children and then your very life".

“Come child, let’s gather some vegetables from the garden,” she said opening the door.  The boy
hung back, then darted through the door in front of her.  She looked at a darkening sky.  Tall fir trees were turning their shadows into creatures that could only be found in a child’s nightmare.   As huge drops of rain began to fall, She ran a few steps after the boy and then stopped. Gripping her chest, she fell heavily against the porch railing the cold hard rain now pelting relentlessly against her back.  She turned her face skyward and let the water run across her cheeks.  It felt good against her warm skin plastering her thin gray hair against her forehead. 

The pain was relentless.  The old woman’s long brown skirt brushed the ground, its hem becoming dark and wet.  Her collar squeezed against her throat restricting the air to her lungs.  She pulled at her neck frantically gasping for air.  The broach at her throat fell to the porch bouncing against the hard wood and ricocheting off into the bushes.  Her knees gave way and she fell to the ground, sitting heavily, stretching her arms to break her fall. 

Somehow, she pulled herself up on to the back porch out of the rain to a low wooden bench.  The world began to move in slow motion.  The end was near.  She reached out for the form that had come back to her and curled on the cold wood floor at her feet.  She leaned over and stroked the long white hair that fell across the boy’s neck.  He turned and starred at her still mute. 

Looking away in horror at the boy’s appearance tears ran down her cheeks.  She felt so sorry for the babe.  It wasn’t fair.  A child was supposed to be a gift from God while her grandson was like something from Satan’s lair.  She loved him more than life itself feeling ashamed when she pulled away from him in disgust.   His birth had been a surprise.  When her daughter had run off soon after the baby was born, she had hidden the child from the world.  He was different and had never made even a sound all of his tender years.  Her husband had died of shame at the bastard child.  God had punished them all now; it was time for her own final judgment. 

Listening to the pounding of the rain she leaned over to hold her babe close to her trembling.  She’d loved the child with all her heart despite the pain he had caused to her and her family.  But, she couldn’t show him; it wasn’t her nature.  A knife-like pain traveled up her arm toward her chest and she gritted her teeth. 

"I promise to watch over you from heaven, my sweet babe,” she said. "I love you."  The increasing pain brought tears to the corners of her eyes.  He watched as her white nostrils flared with each breath and then she slowly closed her eyes.  The boy’s fair hand with long yellowed fingernails reached out instinctively to pull her warmth closer.  Nuzzling the familiar smell, he slept soundly.  He rocked her gently in his thin arms, encircling her, protecting her from the night; guarding her; taking comfort in holding her close.

Unheard, a vehicle wound its way up the hill through the dark landscape.  To one side, it passed a series of caves. Near a waterfall, here tall black walnut trees were wrapped in leaves that once colorful were now lay on the ground turning yellow and brown.  The summer season was dying leaving the skeleton branches of the trees clinging to remaining leaves, as bare as the slate on the nearby cave walls.  Soon to be a canvas on which to paint a harsh winter.  Icicle from the waterfall and lacy frost covered bushes hid the caves in winter months.  Black walnut grow fast and tall.  Already this particular grove was dense.