Dovey Coe
Authors: Frances O'Roark Dowell
for clifton and jack
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author would like to thank the following people for their support and encouragement: Caitlyn Dlouhy, Virginia Holman, Alice Johnston, Nancy Reisman, Del and Jane O'Roark, and Jack and Melvene Dowell.
M
y name is Dovey Coe, and I reckon it don't matter if you like me or not. I'm here to lay the record straight, to let you know them folks saying I done a terrible thing are liars. I aim to prove it, too. I hated Parnell Caraway as much as the next person, but I didn't kill him.
I know plenty of folks who thought about it once or twice, after Parnell shot a BB gun at their cats or broke their daughters' hearts. They're the same ones who go around now making out like Parnell was an angel, a regular pillar of society. The truth is, there ain't no one in Indian Creek who didn't believe Parnell Caraway was the meanest, vainest, greediest man who ever lived. Seventeen years old and rotten to the core.
Of course, his daddy being the richest man in town meant Parnell could do about whatever he pleased without anybody saying
boo
back to him. Most of the folks who live in town rent their houses from Homer Caraway and buy their dry goods from his store, and they know better than to cross him. You so much as look at Homer Caraway wrong and he can make your life right miserable.
Every time I start complaining about having to walk a half mile down the mountain to school every morning, I remember how lucky we are to own our land. It ain't muchâfour acres, a five-room house, and a barnâbut it keeps us Coes from being beholden to Homer Caraway, and I'd walk ten miles to school to keep it that way.
I know it pained Parnell that we weren't indebted to his daddy. Maybe if we had been, my sister Caroline would have married him the way he kept asking her to do. Caroline Coe was the one thing Parnell wanted he couldn't have. As conceited as Parnell was, it took him a long time to figure that out.
But I'm getting ahead of myself, which I do from time to time. You probably want to know where I'm from and who my family is, the particulars folks tend to be interested in.
Like I said, my name is Dovey Coe. There have been Coes living in Indian Creek, North Carolina, since the beginning of time, and I expect there always will be. We're mountain folk, and once you been living in the mountains for a while, it's hard to live anywhere else. You can walk over to the graveyard behind the church in town and see Coes going as far back as 1844. The most recent stone belongs to my Granddaddy Caleb, who passed on two years ago, when I was ten. It says:
HERE LIES CALEB COE, LOVING HUSBAND TO REBECCA COE, FATHER TO MATTHEW, LUKE, AND JOHN COE. BORN MAY 17, 1861. DIED DECEMBER 2, 1926. MAY HE WALK WITH THE LORD.
John Coe is my daddy. He's what they call a jack-of-all-trades, meaning he can fix anything you got that's broke and some things that ain't. Folks bring him their busted radios, their haywire toasters, their broke-down automobiles, and Daddy tightens a screw here, reconnects a wire there, and makes it good as new. Them who have money to pay give him a dollar or two, depending on the size of the job, and them who don't have a dime in their pocket work out a barter. When Gaither Sparks's carburetor died, we got a new pig and a pound of sugar. It evens out, as Daddy is all the time saying.
Mama grew up over in Cane Creek Holler, not two miles from here. She still hums the songs she learned when she was a little girl while she works around the house, and she has taught many of them songs to me. I try my best to remember them the right way, and I always pretend like I'm paying attention when she's telling me all the things she says a young lady ought to know.
Besides Caroline, I got me an older brother named Amos, age of thirteen, and he loves good adventure as much as I do. We spend a good portion of our days running around on Katie's Knob, hunting arrowheads or hunks of crystal quartz, tracking all manner of wild animals and generally having a big time.
We live in the house my daddy grew up in, and every morning I look out upon the same mountains my daddy looked out upon when he was a child. I like sitting on the porch watching the summer evenings fall across the valley, listening to Daddy pick old tunes on his guitar. I enjoy the cozy feel of sitting next to the woodstove when there's a frosty bite in the air.
There's at least a million other things that all add up to my good life here, more things than I can say or even remember, they're so natural to me now.
That's why it's hard to believe they might send me away from here.
It's not that I blamed Caroline for this whole mess. I know deep inside it ain't exactly her fault. But on top of things, it sure feels that way.
“I
reckon Parnell Caraway would do anything for you, including lay down and die,” I said to Caroline one afternoon back in early summer, when Mama's garden was starting to push out every sort of vegetable known to mankind and it seemed like all we did was one chore after the other. Parnell was on my mind that morning, as I had been thinking about how rich folks like him and his sister, Paris, probably never had to do a single chore in their lives.
We was sitting in the shade of the front porch shelling peas for supper. I had finished shelling the peas in my basket and was starting on Caroline's, which was still half full. Caroline was always making plans in her head, and doing something
so ordinary as shelling peas didn't make much of a claim on her attention.
“Good Lord, Dovey,” Caroline said, sounding like I was too addle-brained to be listened to. “Parnell don't care no more for me than he cares for a chicken.”
She ran a hand through her dark hair, her cheeks reddening. From the look in her eyes, I'd say she right enjoyed the idea of some boy laying down and dying for her, not that she'd admit it.
Caroline was sixteen, a whole four years older than myself, but a lot of folks said I acted like the older sister because I weren't afraid of anything and I'd speak my mind when it was called for. They sure didn't mistake me for the prettier sister.
She was so pretty, sometimes I could hardly look at her. It was like she had a white light around her setting off her long dark hair and big green eyes. Daddy said Caroline could stop an army of men with them eyes of hers, and I believed it. I have gray eyes myself, and there ain't enough about them to comment upon.
“I reckon Parnell is low-down enough to love a chicken,” I teased her, wanting to stay in her good graces. There was no fun to be had when Caroline fell into one of them moods of hers.
My chicken remark got her to laughing. “Ain't
you something,” she said, swatting my knee, “going on that way about chickens and love.”
Caroline stood up, brushing peas from her green cotton skirt, and went into the house. I would have bet you one dollar right then and there she was going to go lie across the bed and dream her big dreams about leaving for faraway places without giving a second thought to Parnell Caraway, even though he had been trying to get her to spend time with him for nearly a year.
You see, by the time Caroline had turned fourteen, she had come up with a plan for her life, having decided that living here in Indian Creek was not for her. She wanted to get herself a taste of the world and see what lay beyond these mountains. So she decided she would go to teachers college over in Boone.
She figured that when she finished she'd be able to get a good teaching job in Asheville or maybe even down in Charlotte or Raleigh, and send a little money home to Mama and Daddy. The rest she would spend on pretty clothes and weekend trips to interesting spots. For a long time, Parnell's attentions didn't seem to affect her in the least bit.
I sat finishing up the peas Caroline had left, looking out over the yard and into the woods
beyond. To my way of thinking, if you was born a Coe, then Indian Creek was where you belonged. Coes had lived in this town going on forever, and we were as much a part of it as Katie's Knob and Cane Creek. But as usual Caroline had figured things differently from the way I did.
I wondered some about what it would be like to be Caroline, to have boys coming at you this way and that, their hearts in their hands. Not that I was all that interested in boys, mind you. Nor did I wish to be some raving beauty, since my interests did not lie in the area of romance. Just sometimes I got curious, is all.
One morning Caroline woke me up right early, holding a mug of hot chocolate under my nose, a guaranteed way to get me up of a morning, as Caroline known better than most.
“Dovey, honey, let's go into town and see what they've got at the farmers market.” Caroline give me a smile that said,
please, oh, please.
It had an effect on me, and I jumped right up and started pulling on my dungarees and blouse.
It was a bright Saturday morning, and as usual Caroline was half afraid to go down the mountain by herself. All sorts of wild animals lived in these mountains; we could hear them talking to each other at night, and it was enough to scare a person
sitting on the safety of their porch. During the day, though, it was real rare to see a bear or a cougar. I weren't bothered by the thought of roaming through the woods by myself or with Amos to look for the roots we sold to doctors who lived off the mountain. But Caroline was another story. She was sure she was going to get eaten by a mountain lion unless I was there to beat it off with a stick.
By the time we got to town, Caroline had forgotten all about the wild things. Her mind was on the market and what she might find there. Starting in the spring, farmers brought their families to town and set up a market at the end of King Street, which was the street that run through the middle of things. They sold a variety of goods, not just their produce. You'd see tables set up to sell breads and cakes, quilts of every patternâWater Wheel, Goose Wing, and Dove in the Windowâwooden ducks and pups you could pull along with a string, jars full of marbles, jars full of buttons, an old spinning wheel or a quilting frame that had been gathering dust in somebody's barn, just every sort of thing, and every once in a while you'd run into a veritable treasure.
Caroline and I ambled through the farmers market, enjoying the good smells and the sight of
the many fine things we would buy if we had the money. We stopped in front of a table that held among its fineries a silver-plated mirror and a steel-blade, shiny, red-cased pocketknife. I'd been wanting a pocketknife since the first time I seen one in the Sears and Roebuck catalog. There it sat in the picture, shiny and a little dangerous looking, though I didn't point out that aspect of it to Mama. I could think of a hundred ways of using it, from hacking weeds in the garden to defending myself against a cougar if I ever come across one.
I tried to get Mama interested in the idea of getting me that pocketknife for Christmas, but she weren't having none of it. Mama was trying to wean me from my more boyish ways. “It ain't ladylike to cross your legs that way,” she'd tell me, or, “I'm going to make you give me a nickel for every time I see you spitting in the yard.” I'd see her frown at me from the porch when I set out to go fishing with Amos at the pond out back, and she was all the time telling Daddy I was getting too old to help him fix up cars in the barn.
Caroline kept picking up the mirror and turning it in her hand, trying not to admire her reflection in it too much. Me, I was busy testing the weight of the pocketknife in my hand. It felt just
right. The only problem was it cost fifty cents, and I only had a nickel.