Once Upon a Misty Bluegrass Hill (2 page)

Chapter
1

With regard to being an
Appalachian Mountain Mamma.
There are many pictures and many faces of this woman.  Many were
Cherokee-Appalachian woman
, many were Scotch-Irish women who were the wives of coal miners or farmers
. 
They embodied strength and fortitude that is unmatched and has left a heritage of what the United States is all about
. 
The
Appalachian
were tough and relentless
 

Ap
palachian women have endured hardships with a smile and an unbelievable faith that the things that matter are truth, hard work and being a good person.  They have suffered and have overcome.  My Grandmother is one of those women and I am very proud of her.

She was running out of time.

He was closing in on her.

So she had to be super
-quiet lest she rouse him for a lecherous
opportunity that he press
ed
more frequently of late.

He
pressed his satyriasis
activities
early morning and
late at night.

He
tr
ied
the bathroom door when Aunt Paula was drunk.  Or high. 

Aunt Paula
'
s weird boyfriend
Travis
, who always carried a sharp underarm smell that was not even cushioned by a cotton t-shirt
,
had become
her
persistent
lewd
silent stalker
. 
Already an unpleasant man with a rough
beard and yellowed teeth from his tobacco chewing, he had become
even
more
repulsive
as he found more
creative
ways to be alone with her.

And push his stinking body close
while attempting to
molest
her.

If he wore a shirt at all the sleeves were gone leaving his bushy underarm hair to send out the stinky unwashed
waves
like
radio
signals
that
took Jolene
'
s breath away.

She was running out of time and ways to escape him.

What
was she going to do
?

Finnegan
,
one of her two collie dogs
,
whined for food
.
"
Shush.
"
  Jolene
patted
him
. 

She
carefully
pulled open the fast food bag sitting on the leaning kitchen table that
had
lost its leg when Aunt Paula
'
s two boyfriends met for the first time by accident and had a terrible fight.  The winning boyfriend
,
Travis
,
had perched a
2
"
x 4
"
under the table as a replacement leg, but it was just a bit too short.

Jolene pulled out the uneaten burgers and put them in the dogs
'
bowls.  Aunt Paula always left more than half of her three fast food hamburgers
uneaten.  Which
was really weird because she refused to share with Jolene.  It didn
'
t matter
.
Jolene didn
'
t want the
day old burgers
and Finnegan and Oliver loved fast food. 

She went to the back of the cupboard and
tugged
out the big
dog food
bag and scooped the food out to go with the hamburgers.
  She broke up the burgers and mixed them up with dry dog food that she got from the Super Farm store if she did the mopping for them
at
night. 

She put the bowls out and patted her
pups
as they dove into the bowls.  Finn
egan and Oliver were brothers even though they didn
'
t have the same coloring. 
They had the typical long narrow nose and fluffy chest hair of a collie. 
While Oliver
was gold and white with big peanut
colored
eyes, Finnegan
was a white merle with blue eyes
and a bit of gold touched into
his thick white fur.  Aunt Paula often said he looked like a wolf. 
Of course
this might have been because
Aunt Paula didn
'
t like when they growled at her when she talked too sharply to Jolene.

Jolene watched the
pups
lick the last of the
mixed meal f
rom their bowls
.  They looked up
and tilted their heads
waiting for whatever was next.  She
was thankful she could earn that bit
of money by mopping at night at the Super Farm Store. 
Mopping at night was one thing she could do without a hitch in her day, which she did whenever she could to avoid Aunt Paula's parties and to
pay for the dog
food for Finnegan and Oliver.   

Oliver ran to his tattered
dog
bed and rolled on it making his happy cries.
 
"
Hush now Ollie.
"

Jolene gazed out
of
the
cracked
window into the sunrise. 
She could not believe she had already lived here
nearly two
years.  She never did go to the prom that year after her parents died when she turned sixteen.  Aunt Paula had said it was a waste of time and money. 
Aunt Paula
even threw away the pattern Jolene and her mother had picked out to make the dress after she sold the sewing machine. 
Two
years here seemed a lifetime
now. 

The pure white cool mist rose up over the blue-green hill.  It was a
blessed
Saturday and Aunt Paula was still sleeping off the effects of last night
'
s party.  Jolene prepared to go, as she did most Saturdays, to visit Storm
at the farm
and bring him an apple. 

Unfortunately,
it would be
an apple she procured as an ill gotten gain.  But since
they
fell from the tree by the road at old man Jenkins
'
s place, it wasn
'
t really stealing when you thought about it very far down the road.  Unless you considered such a thing as stealing
.  The apples would only be for
the bees that might swarm around flattened apple
s
in the road…or the raccoons that might otherwise partake of the apple
s
late into the night
. 
Nobody liked bees or raccoons. 
Better
that the apples were given to
Storm.

She
went to the bathroom
,
scrubbed her face with
an
energetic rub
of a soap-filled
rag and tied her unruly red hair
that fell just past
her
shoulders into a pony tail. 

S
trands of fire. 

That is what her father called her hair when she was a little girl. 

She donned her hole-in-the-knees jeans that had nothing to
do
with a designer label and an old plaid shirt that belonged to her father. 
Her
"
Superman Shirt
"
was one he
r father
had worn countless times in her childhood. 
It was one of the few things she was able to save from Aunt Paula
'
s big yard sale. 
Now she believed it held magic powers. 

No one would ever catch her visiti
ng Storm when she wore this shir
t
. 
In
daddy's
shirt
s
he was brave and powerful like the special ops women she read about in a book about women in wars
.

Pausing at the screen door she tried to
make a quick
repair one side of the screen that had come out from underneath the rubber. 

No wonder the house was crawling with flies hanging over old bottles and Aunt Paula
'
s food like landing Schnook
Helicopters that flew overhead
. 

Jolene had not cleaned up last night after Aunt Paula
'
s party because she had fallen asleep in bed with her algebra book.  There was a huge test Monday.  If she could make an A she didn
'
t have to take the final. 

Less risk of failure. 

One more grade for her college resume.

She had to make good grades in her final semester if she was to get that scholarship and go to college.  She only had another year and the only thing that was going to get her into school was better grades than someone else.  Someone else whose father knew somebody. 

Not to worry
about the mess right now
.  She would clean up as soon as she got home.  And
she would
figure out something cheap for dinner
…maybe even use an internet recipe
.  Now that Aunt Paula liked to advertise herself on
the
internet Jolene could look up a lot of cool stuff. 
But right now she h
ad to escape without waking up
Aunt Paula.  Goodness kn
ows
you didn
'
t want to wake Aunt Paula after a party night.

But she especially
had to
avoid waking up Travis
.  He had even
hit her several times lately
for contrived reasons
.  Jolene shivered and pressed the screen under the rubber holder.

Pleased with her ability to
temporarily
reset the screen, Jolene
carefully
pushed the screen door open for her dogs to race out quietly with their own
apparent
ability to understand
hiding from Aunt Paul
a
. 
Jolene
held the door to a gentle close once she was on the other side. 

What was the point of her taking precious time to fix a screen that had so many darned holes anyway? 
She wished she could
ask her friend Flint to come over with his tool box.  They would
have
go
ne
to the junk yard and
found
some new screen.  She knew how to use
his
tools better than him
but she
never did say so
. 

She was
grateful
s
he had never said that to him now that he was
dead
at 1
9 years old.  He
had
killed himself wh
en his girlfriend wrote him a "D
ear Flint" letter while he was in Afghanistan.  The last time he was home he had helped her fix the dog houses so that she could hide money from Aunt Paula in mason jars and bury them under the houses.

He had seemed to have such purpose that
last
day
she saw him
.  He
had
told her a story about Afghanistan and the
'
hour of the lamps
'
....he told her how beautiful it was to see all the lamps lighting along the hillsides when it grew dark. 

Two weeks later, he was dead.  The beauty of the hour of the lamps was not enough to keep him going when his girlfriend dumped him.  If only
Jolene
had known he was that fragile....she might have said something.  Written
him
more often.

But it was too late.

His mother had given her his tools. 
S
he would put the screen
right again.

Even though
nothing would ever be
quite
the same
without her best friend Flint.

But she could not let herself hurt right now.  She could not afford sadness lest she drown.