IGMS - Issue 12 Page 16

  No trouble all through the mountains. No danger that felt like danger, except a few tight minutes at the Cherokee border, till somebody came along who recognized Jamie Teague. And at last they left the paved road and climbed up a dirt track, all overgrown now that no cars ever came through, and came to a two-story house completely dwarfed by giant oak trees.

  "I thought you called this a cabin, Jamie Teague," she said.

  "My foster parents called it that," he said. "They were summer people. But as soon as I was old enough, I stayed year-round."

  Tina caught up that information and remembered it. Teague had foster parents before he was old enough to decide where he was going to live. So if he was fostered out because he killed his parents, he must have killed them when he was young. Probably very young.

  The door was not locked. Yet inside, the house was untouched by thieves or vandals. It was deep with dust and dead insects -- no one had entered all summer, least of all to clean. Yet every implement was in its place, and Annalee immediately set everyone to work cleaning up. Tina knew she should have joined in -- she probably knew more about cleaning than everybody else put together -- but for some reason she just felt an aversion to it, just didn't want to. And the more she thought she ought to help, the less she felt like helping, until finally she fled the house.

  "Stop," said Teague.

  "Why?"

  "You don't just walk outside and go where you want," said Teague.

  "Why not?"

  "My neighbors don't know you yet."

  "They'll know me soon enough," she said. "I've always been a good neighbor."

  "It ain't like the neighbors down in the city, Mrs. Monk."

  "If you can't bring yourself to call me Sister Monk, then at least call me Tina."

  Teague grinned. "Go in there and get everybody ready for an expedition."

  The expedition was a trip to each of four neighbors' houses, singing and talking the whole way. The houses were set so far apart you couldn't see any of them from the other. But that didn't matter. They were neighbors all the same. They were the reason Teague's house was untouched. And they could be deadly.

  "Mr. Bicker," said Teague. "I see you pulled a good crop of tobacco."

  "Mountain tobacco's only a speck better than chewing dog turds," said Bicker, "but I got a few leaves curing anyway."

  "Mr. Bicker, you see these folks I got with me?"

  "Do I look blind?"

  "I've been with these folks since Winston, and they treated me like kin. We've been eating out of the same pot and walking the same road, and stood back to back a few times. They're staying the winter with me and then they're moving on. I showed them the property line, and they all know what land is mine and what land is yours."

  Bicker sniffed. "Never knowed city people could tell one tree from another."

  But we can read, thought Tina, and we don't let snot trail on our upper lips. She had sense enough not to say it.

  "City people or not, Mr. Bicker, they're my people, all of them."

  "Them is colored there."

  "I call that a deep suntan, Mr. Bicker. Or maybe Cherokee blood. But they'll be gone in spring, and you'll hardly notice they're around."

  Bicker squinted.

  "But they'll be around," said Teague. "Every one of them. Every last one, alive and moving around in the spring."

  "Hope there's no influenza," said Bicker. Then he went back into his cabin, laughing and laughing.

  Teague led them away. "Sing," he told Tina, and she led them in singing.

  "This is like Christmas caroling," said Annalee's girl Donna.

  "Except we didn't used to sing carols so people wouldn't shoot at us," said Tina.

  "Oh, Bicker's all right," said Teague. "He'll be fine."

  "Fine? He practically loaded his shotgun right in front of us."

  "Oh, he's a good neighbor, Tina. You just got to know how to treat him."

  "I don't call it a good neighbor when he merely agrees not to kill you before spring."

  But Tina was pretty sure Teague didn't entirely know what he was talking about. After all, he'd been a boy up here, not a girl. There was one kind of neighborliness between men, which mostly consisted of not stealing from each other and not sleeping with each other's wife. Then there was the neighborliness of women, which Teague wouldn't know a thing about.

  So she made sure to go along with him as he started going around trading the things he'd gotten on his trip to the coast. All kinds of tooled metal, threads and needles, buttons, pins, scissors, spoons and knives and forks. A precious pair of binoculars, for which Teague got a queen-size mattress in exchange. Bullets to fit half a dozen different guns. A bottle of vitamin C and a bottle of Extra-Strength Tylenol Caplets, both for an old lady with arthritis.

  And right after he got through bartering, Tina would start in talking about how she was near helpless cooking wild game. "I make a fair broth, and I expect I can use my sweet dumpling recipe with honey for the sugar, but you must know ten dozen herbs and vegetables that I'll just step on thinking they're weeds. I don't want to be a bother, but I can trade sewing for cooking lessons. I've got a decent eye with a needle." Teague was dumbfounded at first -- it was obvious that in all the time he'd been trading with the menfolk, talking in words of one or two syllables and sentences of three or four words, he'd never had an inkling of how a woman goes calling, of how women help each other instead of trying to drive a bargain. "It's called civilization," she said to Teague, between visits. "Women invented it, and every time you men blow it all to bits, we just invent it again."

  By Christmas she had Bicker himself coming over for supper every night, bringing his fiddle and a memory of a thousand old songs, none of which he sang on key, which nobody minded except Tina, who had been cursed with pitch so clear she could sing quarter tones in a chromatic scale. Never mind -- the kids didn't have to live in fear of getting their feet shot off if they happened to stray over the line into Bicker's land. And Teague just sat there singing and laughing along with everybody else, now and then getting this look of surprise on his face, like he'd never had a notion that folks in these mountains ever did such things as this.

  In only one thing did Tina follow Teague's heartfelt advice. She never told a soul, nor did anybody else, that they were Mormons. They never sang a Mormon hymn, and on Sunday mornings, when Brother Deaver and Pete Cinn broke bread and blessed the sacrament and passed it, and then they preached, why, they kept the shutters closed and never sang. It wasn't the hate from the TV preachers and the Baptist ministers of the city that they feared. It was an older kind of loathing. Put a name like Mormon on somebody, and he stopped being folks and started being Other. And around here, Other got ostracized at the least, and usually got burnt out before spring planting.

  But it was a good winter all the same. And Tina noticed how Teague listened and finally came downstairs during church meetings, and even asked a question now and then about something from the Book of Mormon or some point of doctrine he'd never heard of before. Sometimes he shook his head like it was the craziest mess he'd ever heard of. And sometimes he kind of almost nodded. At Christmas he even told the Christmas story, pretty much following Luke.

  Tina held school every day, at first just for the kids in their group, but pretty soon for whatever mountain kids could make it through the snow. She got Rona and Marie to teach sometimes, so she could divide the classes. Brother Deaver taught grammar to Donna and the older kids from the nearby cabins. The worst thing was, no paper to write on, and nothing to write with. They wrote with burnt sticks on the porch, then scrubbed the porch with snow and started over. Mostly, though, they did their writing and arithmetic in their heads, reciting their answers. Tina realized she was growing old when the kids regularly out-ciphered her -- she just couldn't hold as many numbers at once as they could. That was when Rona became the permanent arithmetic teacher.

  They didn't teach geography at all. Nobody knew geography anymore. Everything had chang
ed.

  All through the winter, Teague took Pete along to teach him more about hunting and tracking, and Pete learned pretty well, Tina gathered; at least Teague seemed to get closer to him all the time, approving of him, trusting him. At the same time, Tina noticed that Pete seemed to get more and more distant from his family. There wasn't much room for privacy, but as the only married couple, Pete and Annalee had a room to themselves. The day after Christmas Annalee told Tina that she might as well sleep on the dining room table for all the lovemaking she got anymore. "I might as well be a widow, he never even talks to me." And then: "Tina, I think he isn't planning to go on west with us."

  Tina let things ride through January, watching. Annalee was right. Pete never took part in their frequent speculations about Utah. Teague would tease them all sometimes, when nobody else was around. "Nothing grows out west," he'd say. "They probably all moved on to Seattle. You'll get to Utah and nobody'll be there."

  "You don't know what you're talking about, Jamie Teague," said Tina one time. "You don't know our people. If it floods we all go into the boatmaking business. If there's a hurricane we all learn to fly."

  Others picked up on it. "If the corn crop fails, we learn to eat grass," said Donna.

  "And when the grass gets used up, we chew up the trees!" said Mick Porter.

  "And then we eat bugs!" shouted his little brother Scotty.

  "And worms!" shouted Mick, even louder.

  Annalee put a hand on Mick's mouth. "Let's keep it down." Didn't want the neighbors to hear them talking about Utah.

  "You can bet they're making gasoline out of shale oil," Tina said. "That's no tall tale. I bet there's still tractors plowing there, and fertilizer."

  "I believe the fertilizer," said Teague. But his eyes danced a little, Tina could see that.

  So she pressed her case. "And what have you got here, Jamie?"

  It wasn't Teague who answered. It was Pete. "He's got everything," he said. "Safety. Good land. Enough to eat. Good neighbors. And no reason to move on, ever."

  There it was, out in the open.

  But Tina pretended that it was still Teague she was talking to, instead of Pete. "That's this year, Jamie. You make your trips down into the Carolinas. You go into abandoned houses, you visit places and tell stories and they give you gifts. And what do you collect to bring back here? Needles and pins, scissors and thread, tools and all the things that make life halfway livable. Think about that! Do you think those things will last forever? Nobody's making them anymore, and someday the scavenging will run out. Someday there'll be no more thread, no more needles. What'll you wear then? Some rag of homespun? Anybody spinning yet?"

  "Lady down in Murphy spins and weaves real good," said Teague. Pete nodded like that answered everything.

  "Enough for everybody in the hills? Jamie, don't you see that folks around here are just holding on by their fingernails? It isn't as plain to see here because you don't go to sleep in fear of mobs every night. But it's all slipping away. It's fading. And whoever stays here is going to fade, too. But out west --"

  "Out west they might all be dead!" said Pete.

  "Out west the temple is still standing, and the wards are all still functioning, just like they always have. They're growing crops on good land -- in peace -- and there'll still be hospitals and medicines. What if you marry someday, Jamie? What if your kids get some disease? A simple one like measles. And they end up blind. A kidney infection. Appendicitis, for heaven's sake. You seen any more doctors growing up around here? Every year you'll slip back another fifty years."

  "It's safe here," said Pete. But his voice was fainter.

  "It isn't safe compared to safety," said Tina. "It's only safe compared to the open lands where the mob rules. And someday you know the mobbers are coming up here. They'll have killed off or run off everybody down there who isn't protected by an army. Those mobbers aren't going to settle down and learn to farm, you know. They won't attack the Cherokees, either. They'll come to places like this --"

  "And we'll kill them all," said Pete.

  "Till you run out of bullets. Then there's no more shooting from behind trees. Then you fight out in the open against ten times your number, by hand, till they sweep you under. I tell you there's only one place safe in all America, only one place that's growing upward against all the dying."

  "Says you," said Pete.

  "Says all the history of the Mormon people. We've been driven out and mobbed and massacred before, and all we ever do is move on and settle somewhere else. And wherever we settle there's peace and progress. We never hold still. I'm betting we don't even have to get to the mountains to find them. I'm betting they send people out to meet folks like us and help us safely in. That's what they used to do, in the covered wagon days."

  All this time Tina only looked at Teague, never once at Pete. But out of the corner of her eye she could see how Pete deflated when Teague nodded. "I guess you aren't crazy to try to get there after all. I just wish I had more hope of your making it."

  "The Lord will protect us," said Tina.

  "He was doing a slim job of it till Teague came along," said Pete.

  "But Jamie came along, didn't you, Jamie? Why do you think you happened to be there when we needed you so bad?"

  Teague grinned. "I reckon I'm just a regular old angel," he said.

  Still, Easter came and no decision had been made. They had a church service on Easter Sunday, but nobody preached this time. They just bore testimony. It wasn't like the old days, when people used to get up and recite the same old I'm-thankful-fors and I-know-thats. This time they spoke from the heart, spoke of terrible things and wonderful things, spoke of love for each other and anger at the Lord and yet in the end spoke of faith that things would all work out.

  And after a while they started talking about the thing they'd only hinted at all these months together. The thing that had happened back in May, almost a year before. The terrible death of so many people they knew and loved and missed so bad. And the even worse thing -- that they themselves had not died.

  It was Cheri Ann Bee who started it off. She was seven now, and not even baptized yet, but she still bore her testimony, and at the end she said something real simple, but it about broke Tina's heart. "I'm sorry I didn't get sick that day and stay home," she said, "so I could've gone with Mommy and Daddy to visit Heavenly Father." Cheri Ann didn't cry or anything; she just plain believed that things were better with her mother and father. And as Tina sat there with tears in her eyes, she wasn't sure if she felt like crying out of pity for this girl or if she felt like crying because she herself didn't have such plain and simple faith, and lacked something of that perfect trust that death was just a matter of going to pay a call on God, who would invite you into his house to live with him.

  "I'm sorry, too," said Brother Deaver, and then he did cry, tears running down his cheeks. "I'm sorry I went to work that day. I'm sorry that the Christian Soldiers were so afraid of provoking the black community of Greensboro that they didn't come take me out of class at A&T and let me hold my babies in my arms while they were dying."

  "His kids wasn't babies," Scott Porter whispered to Tina. "They was bigger than me."

  "All children are always babies to their mama and papa," Tina answered.

  "I called my mama that morning," said Annalee, and wonder of wonders, she was crying, too, looking as soft and vulnerable as a child. "I told her how Pete was keeping the kids home from school and we were making a picnic of it at the fire station. And she said, I wisht I could come. And then she said, Can't talk now, Anny Leedy, there's somebody at the door. Somebody at the door! It was them at the door, and there I was talking to her on the phone and I didn't even say I love you one last time or nothing."

  There was silence for a while, the way there always was in testimony meetings from time to time, when nobody stood up to talk. It always used to be so tense when nobody talked, everybody feeling guilty cause the time was going to waste and hoping somebody else wou
ld get up and talk cause they didn't feel like it. This time, though, the silence was just because everybody was so full and there wasn't a thing to say.

  "I knew," said Pete, finally. "I had a dream the night before. I saw the men coming to the doors. I was shown. That's why I kept the kids home. That's why I got us all over to the fire station."

  "You never told me this," said Annalee.

  "I thought it was crazy, that's why. I thought I was plain out of my mind to take a nightmare so serious. But I couldn't leave you all home, feeling like I did." Pete looked around at the others. "My station, they stood by me. They turned on the hoses and drove them back. My captain said to them, 'If you touch any fireman or any fireman's family, don't be surprised to find your own house on fire someday, and the fire engines a little slow to show up and save you.' And so they went away, and we were alive." Suddenly his face twisted up and he sobbed, great and terrible sobs.

  "Petey," said Annalee. She put her arm around him, but he shrugged her off.

  "God showed me a vision, don't you see? All I could think to save was my own family. Not even my brothers and sisters! Not even my mama! I had a chance to save them all, and they're dead because I didn't give warning."

  Brother Deaver tried to soothe him with words. "Pete, the Lord didn't command you in that dream to give warning. He didn't tell you to call everybody and tell them. So he probably meant to take the others to himself, and spare only a few to suffer further in this vale of tears."

  Pete lifted his face from his hands, a mask of grief with reddened eyes staring out, wild and terrible. "He did tell me," said Pete. "Warn them all, he said, only I just thought it was a nightmare, I was too embarrassed to claim to have a vision, I thought they'd all think I was crazy. I'm going to hell, don't you see? I can't go to Utah. I'm rejected and cast off from the Lord."

  "Even Jonah was forgiven," said Brother Deaver.

  But Pete wasn't in the mood to be comforted. It was the end of the meeting, but it was a good meeting, Tina knew that. Everybody said the things they'd been holding back all along, or had those things said for them. They'd done what a testimony meeting was supposed to do. They'd confessed their sins, and now there was hope of forgiveness.