The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter

To Charlotte T. Ross, a keeper of the Legends

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The epigraph in Chapter Five is taken from "Han-Ion Mountain in Mist," by Jim Wayne Miller, from Dialogue with a Dead Man (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1974); rpt. Green River Press, 1978. Reprinted by permission of the author.

The epigraph in Chapter Eleven is taken from "The Hillbilly Vampire," by Amy Tipton Gray, from The Hillbilly Vampire, Rowan Mountain Press, 1990. Reprinted by permission of the author.

The author would like to thank the following people for their generous help with the technical matters touched upon in this novel: Dr. Jean Haskell-Speer, chairman of the Appalachian Studies Department at Virginia Tech; Dr. Charlotte Tyler Ross, Appalachian State University; Terry L. Brown; David Kellcher; J. A. Niehaus, Kettering Ohio Police Department; Charles and Mary Thomas Watts; and especially David K. McCrumb, for his help with the environmental issues, and my editor, Susanne Kirk, who has been with me every step of the way on this novel, beginning in a cabin in the hills of Georgia in 1990, when we all sat around and talked about ghosts, the Sight, and the lore of the Southern mountains.

The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter

Summer for the living, Winter for the dead.

—THE RULE FOR SOLSTICE ALIGNMENT OF STANDING STONES IN PRE-CHRISTIAN BRITAIN

Nora Bonesteel was the first one to know about the Underhill family. Death was no stranger to Dark Hollow, Tennessee, but Nora Bonesteel was the only one who could see it coming.

She was well past seventy, and she lived alone in a white frame house up on the part of Ashe Mountain that had been Bonesteel land since 1793. Across the patchwork of field and forest, eye to eye with the Bonesteel house, was the outcrop of rock called Hangman, looking down on the holler with a less benevolent eye than Nora Bonesteel's. They perched on their respective summits, the granite man and the parchment woman, in a standoff older than the pines that edged the meadows.

She seldom left her mountain fastness except to walk down the gravel road to church on Sunday morning, but she had a goodly number of visitors—mostly people wanting advice—but they'd come bringing homemade blackberry jelly or the latest picture of the grandbaby so as not to seem pushy about it. Folks said that no matter how early you reached her house of a morning with a piece of bad news, she'd meet you on the porch with a mug of fresh-brewed chicory coffee, already knowing what it was you'd come about.

Nora Bonesteel did not gossip. The telephone company had never got around to stringing the lines up Ashe Mountain. She just knew.

Dark Hollow folk, most of them kin to her, anyhow, took it for granted, but it made some of the townspeople down in Hamelin afraid, the way she sat up there on the mountain and kept track of all the doings in the valley; sat up there with her weaving, and her pet groundhog, and her visions.

The night that Garrett Webster died in that wreck on the road to Asheville, Nora had the carrot cake baked to take to the funeral by the time somebody stopped in the next morning to tell her about the accident. She had a dream, she said, while she was sleeping in that old iron bedstead with the hollow pipes at the head and foot of it. Suddenly, she had heard a clang and felt the bed vibrate, as if somebody had hit those footboard pipes with the point of a sword. She'd sat up in bed, looking to see what woke her, and there was Garrett Webster standing at the foot of her bed, smiling at her from inside a glow of white light. When he saw that she'd seen him and knew who he was, he faded away, and the room was dark again. It was eight minutes past five, Nora said, and she got up right then to start fixing that cake for Esther Webster and her boys. The state trooper's report said that the wreck between Garrett Webster's

car and a semi on Route 58 had occurred at 5:08 that morning. It also stated that Webster never knew what hit him, but Nora Bonesteel reckoned he had.

She knew other things, too. Who was pregnant, when to cover your tomato plants for frost, and where your missing wedding ring would turn up. She could cure nosebleeds by quoting the sixteenth chapter of Ezekiel, sixth verse; and she knew how to gauge the coming winter by the bands on a woolly worm. But that was nothing to marvel at. Every family had somebody with the simple gifts; even ones who knew when there had been a death within their family, but what made Nora Bonesteel different from others with the Sight was that for her it wasn't only a matter of knowing about close kin. The fate of the whole community seemed as open to her as the weekly newspaper. Even newcomers, like the Underhills, outsiders who had bought an old farm and had come as strangers to settle between the mountains, were within the range of her visions.

Nobody in Dark Hollow ever mistook her for a witch. She taught Sunday school to the early teens, and she kept her place in an old leather King James Bible with the feather of a red-bird's wing. Nora Bonesteel never wished harm, never tried to profit by her knowledge. Most times, she wouldn't even tell people things if it was bad news that couldn't be avoided. And if she did impart a warning, she'd look away while she told it, and say what she had to in a sorrowful way that was nobody's idea of a curse. She

just knew things, that's all. In the east Tennessee hills, there had always been people who knew things. Most people felt a little sorry for her, and were glad they could go through life with the hope that comes from not seeing the future through well-polished glass.

There is no death! The leaves may fall, And flowers may fade and pass away—

They only wait, through wintry hours, The warm sweet breath of May

-J. L. MCCREERY

The road was dark. What moonlight there was from a dime-sized crescent moon was shrouded by the cluster of pines choking the one-lane blacktop. Laura Bruce drove the winding mountain road as quickly as she dared, her eyes straining into the darkness in search of deer that might dart out in front of the car. There was enough death abroad tonight in Dark Hollow without hitting a straggling doe.

There is a lot of blood at the scene, Sheriff Spencer Arrowood had said when he phoned her. / had to tell you that so that you would be prepared for it. We have enough to contend with as it is. But if you think you can stand it, I need you to come.

Her fingers tightened around the steering wheel. Thirty-five miles an hour. She might have gone faster if she were more familiar with the road, but she had only lived in the area for a year, and this road leading nowhere but deep into the hollers was a route she seldom traveled. She was still a little frightened of the wilder sections of Wake County, where no electric lights diminished the brilliance of the stars, and

miles of forest separated each human habitation. It wasn't the people she feared but the isolation. Suppose the car broke down? Will, her new husband, had no such qualms about the mountain road. He loved to drive it in late spring when the mountain laurel turned the shady hillsides pink and white, and in the autumn, when an occasional break in the trees would reveal an endless vista of forests of rust and gold spreading out across the hills below. Will knew each mile of the route, and every householder along the way, from the visits he had made to families back in the hollow, in time of sickness or bereavement. Laura had never gone with him. The role of minister's wife was new to her, and there was still a strangeness to it. She could not see herself a mother to the community, and she was deliberately vague about her own religious views in the face of the parishioners' literal belief.

Her hometown, Roanoke, Virginia, lay four hours to the east. Life in a city with a symphony, a zoo, and several colleges had left her ill equipped for the role of parson's wife in the hills and hollers of east Tennessee.

She was a pharmacist's daughter who grew up in the Kmart/Long John Silver/Brady Bunch culture of suburban Americana. If there was some other world, older and more substantial than hers, in the hills that surrounded Roanoke, she never discovered it. That had come to her late in life, when she met Will Bruce of Wake County, Tennessee.

Will looked every inch an Irishman, and he probably was, given the Appalachian gene pool. They were a study in contrasts: He was blond and stocky and cheerful, and she was dark and serious and filled with doubt. The most comment, though, was caused by the fact that he was only twenty-nine, to her thirty-eight. They resolutely ignored the remarks that this occasioned among their more forthright acquaintances.

Will wasn't very "ministerial," as far as she could tell. Their first date was a Statler Brothers concert, and after years of sneering at country music, Laura was surprised to find out how much she liked it, and how much of it she could relate to. Will was unselfconscious in his enjoyment. After a year of commuter dating down Interstate 81, they decided to marry. It was only later that she realized that marriage to Will entailed greater than ordinary obligations: He came with the spiritual baggage of two hundred souls of Shiloh Baptist Church. She told herself that she would begin by going through the motions as pastor's wife, hoping that the emotions would eventually follow.

So far, they had not. She had visions of an eternally smiling Donna Reed gliding among the congregation like a ministering angel, but she still found herself standing awkwardly at Will's side, wondering if she was overdressed and trying without notable success to think of something she could possibly discuss with these people who seemed neither to read nor travel.

She wished that Will were home now, so that the sheriff's call for assistance could have been

answered by more capable hands than hers. There was a quiet strength in Will that made people want to confide in him, knowing he wouldn't be shocked no matter what was said. These mountain folk were his people, and he understood them. She wondered if he would have been shocked at this.

/ can deal with the bodies and the crime scene, the sheriff had assured her. But I haven't the time or the temperament to tend to the living. I'd be grateful if you'd come.

The sheriff was a stranger to her, but she could hear the concern in his voice, and she agreed to go at once. What excuse could she have made? It was as if Will Bruce had left the valley in her care, and she must do her best to comfort these strangers in trouble. Surely, she reasoned, if the sheriff could have found anybody else to go out there, he would have asked them. Or did he assume that the minister's wife was the logical substitute when the minister himself was unavailable?

As she drove through the silent woods, she took her mind off her destination by mentally composing a letter to her husband, on temporary duty as an army chaplain in the Middle East, ministering to the troops left behind after the Gulf War.

Dear Will, she thought. Nora Bones tee I was right. A couple of weeks ago I thought she was crazy when she showed me that awful graveyard quilt and told me about her fears. But she was right. The deaths have come. And since

you're a continent away, I am stuck with the task of ministering to the living, as the sheriff put it. I will do my best, but Lord knows, they deserve better.

She slowed at a crossroads to read the small white road sign—a four-digit number almost impossible to make out in the glow of headlights. Turn left here. As she eased the car up the steep washboard of a mountain road, she thought of the last time she had driven that route. It had been several weeks ago, when she had gone to see Nora Bonesteel. Will had been stationed in the Gulf two months by then, and Laura had decided that it was time to stop feeling sorry for herself. She needed to get on with her normal routine.

In her mind an image of Donna Reed informed her that the minister's wife had a sacred duty to see to the parishioners, including the paying of an occasional home visit. She laughed at her own sanctimonious fantasies. Surely no one would care if she called on them or not, as awkward as she was conversing with them. But it would give her something to do. Jobs in Wake County were almost nonexistent for a thirty-eight-year-old woman with a college degree.

Every morning since Labor Day, she had gotten up, put on her blue wool suit, and waited by the telephone from six-thirty until eight, but calls for a substitute teacher were rare. She averaged three times a month, filling in for one of the county teachers who had the flu or a funeral to go to. The rest of the time, she eventually

took off the suit, put on her old clothes, and cleaned the already clean house. One person alone didn't make too much of a mess. Today the phone had rung at 8:35, but it hadn't been the school system. It was the doctor's office. After spending twenty minutes staring at a congealing plate of eggs, she had decided that she needed to get out of the house. She would go visiting.

On less than a year's acquaintance, Laura Bruce still wasn't able to confide in her husband's parishioners. Their lives and their concerns were different from her own. Most of the women in Will's congregation had married in their late teens, settled down within hailing distance of parents or in-laws, and raised a brood of children. They had lives of accustomed hardship, but it would never have occurred to them to call themselves poor. They owned their own land and supplemented their income with garden-grown food and game from the mountain forests. They made their own clothes and seemed immune to the credit snares of their city cousins. They were all right as long as the world kept its taint out of their lives, Laura thought. But let their husbands take to drink, or find a younger woman and divorce them, and the smoothly working social system broke down. Even if there were jobs for unskilled women—fast-food places in Johnson City or a factory job in Erwin—they couldn't afford the commuting and child-care costs to take them. It seemed to Laura that every woman in Dark

Hollow was exactly one man away from welfare.

She and Janet Underhill were the exceptions. Poor Janet Underhill. That's where Laura was going now. To the Underhills'. "There is a lot of blood," the sheriff had said. Laura and Janet were both outsiders, both college graduates, but beyond that they had little in common. When the Underhills first bought the old Tilden farm on the river, Will had gone over to welcome them to the community and invite them to church, but only their teenage daughter, Maggie, came with any regularity. She was now a member of the choir. Besides Maggie, the Underhills had three sons, but they weren't much on churchgoing. The family turned up at morning service every six weeks or so, for no particular reason that Laura Bruce could see. They didn't seem to mix well with their neighbors, although there was never any trouble. They just kept to themselves.

Maj. Paul Underhill was a short, wiry man with a graying crew cut and sharp little eyes like a ferret's. He was retired from the army now, but he would call himself major forever after. Janet never had much to say for herself. She seemed to be composed entirely of shades of beige, and her colorless smile had all the warmth of a winter moon. She didn't seem to want friends, and her husband had an impatient way about him that kept most people at a distance. Laura knew that the major had decided to farm when he retired from his army career. She wondered if they were happy in

their choice of Dark Hollow as the place to call home.

So far, the rest of the community had been reserved but friendly toward the Underhills, and toward Laura, a woman with the right accent but city ways, and she found them reminiscent of the folks back in her southwest Virginia home, and therefore easy to get on with in a superficial way. As for Will getting called up by the Guard—people had been very sympathetic about it. They used a lay preacher, as they had in the old days, before seminaries began using rural churches as "starter parishes" for their graduates. Some of the oldest church members still remembered the time when a circuit rider on horseback had been pastor of six or seven far-flung churches, visiting one each Sunday in succession. Will's great-granddaddy had been a circuit preacher, traversing the green mountains on a shining bay saddle horse. In his black suit and string tie, with a Bible and a hymnbook in his saddlebag, he had ridden a six-church circuit until he was eighty, baptizing and burying generations of mountain Christians.

Perhaps it was not strange that Will's congregation had been understanding about his absence. Patriotism ran deep in the hills; Tennessee seceded, but Appalachia had been staunchly Union through the Civil War. Country was a duty never questioned; government policy was not debated. But when Uncle Sam got to meddling (prohibition, for example), the law was conveniently ignored. Half the time

Laura wished that she could accept life as trustingly as the local people did, and the rest of the time she thought them naive, natural victims of a corrupt and greedy system. Still, their certainty that Will was right and honorable in serving his country gave Laura strength, but she had a feeling that before long she was going to need more than that. She might even need some advice from the parish prophetess Nora Bonesteel.

That day, when her curiosity about the old lady had won out over her fear and skepticism, she had asked directions at the general store and set off on a parish visit. As her car rounded the first steep bend and began the sharply angled climb to the summit, Laura could see most of the Dark Hollow valley out the passenger side window. Although it was early November, the weather had not yet been cold enough to kill the grass, so the meadows that stretched out below her were still green, with rolled stacks of hay lined up against the fence, awaiting the inevitable winter. Far below she could see the Weavers' Angus herd grazing on the bank of Dark Creek. The valley was a succession of low, rounded hills, stretched out vertically between the spines of two mountain ranges. The far one, she thought, would be North Carolina mountains, but from here there was no discernible boundary, only an endless roll of blue hills in a haze stretching toward the horizon.

The remoteness of the mountain vista reminded her that Nora Bonesteel was elderly

and lived alone, which made it even more thoughtful to check on her between Sundays every now and then. In this part of the country, neighbors were well out of hollering distance, and hospitals were an hour away in any direction.

By the time Laura's car had crested the mountain, opening up all the spreading vast-ness of the Little Dove River two thousand feet below, she was worrying more about herself than about Nora. Would Nora expect her to lead a prayer or anything? Would the old woman sense what was troubling her? Should she even talk about it with a parishioner? She wished Will were here to advise her.

She stopped the car on the summit to think and to look out at the comforting wilderness. The Little Dove Valley was a tapestry of autumn browns and gold, with only the Underbills' pastureland and the pine trees on the hills to give it a touch of green.

Brownest of all was the river. Laura's gaze hardened as she stared out at the swath of dead, dun-colored water, oozing through the cut in the hills. She wondered if animals tried to drink there anymore. This is what comes of never questioning the government, she thought angrily. They won't give a damn about what happens to you. Will had read some of the newspaper articles about the environmental hazards of the river, and he thought that the community should hold a meeting about the Little Dove River. He had talked about petitions, and letters to the district's congressman,

but another cause had captured his attention before he could appeal to his flock for action. Now Will was facing action of a different sort, and the Little Dove rolled on as before, bringing its poison into the valley. Laura sighed, unhappy to be reminded that no wilderness is really very far from the taint of civilization.