The Rosewood Casket
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Authors: Sharyn McCrumb
Tags: #Fiction, #Historical, #Cultural Heritage
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For my fellow Appalachian writers
Garry Barker, David Hunter, and Clyde Kessler—
sons of the pioneers
CONTENTS
“Small Farms Disappearing in Tennessee”
SMALL FARMS DISAPPEARING IN TENNESSEE
Sometimes a whole farm family comes awake
in a close dark place over a motor’s hum
to find their farm’s been rolled up like a rug
with them inside it. They will be shaken onto
the streets of Cincinnati, Dayton, or Detroit.
It’s a ring, a syndicate dismantling farms
on dark nights, filing their serial numbers
smooth, smuggling them north like stolen cars,
disposing of them part by stolen part.
Parts of farms turn up in unlikely places:
weathered gray boards from a Tennessee burley tobacco
barn are up against the wall of an Ohio
office building, lending a rustic effect.
A Tennessee country church suddenly appeared
disguised as a storefront in downtown Chicago.
Traces of Tennessee farms are found on the slopes
of songs written in Bakersfield, California.
One missing farm was found intact at the head
of a falling creek in a recently published short story.
One farm that disappeared without a clue
has turned up in the colorful folk expressions
of a state university building and grounds custodian.
A whole farm was found in the face of Miss Hattie Johnson,
lodged in a Michigan convalescent home.
Soil samples taken from the fingernails
of Ford plant workers in a subdivision
near Nashville match those of several farms
which recently disappeared in the eastern end of the state.
A seventy-acre farm that came to light
in the dream of a graduate student taking part
in a Chicago-based dream research project
has been put on a micro-card for safekeeping.
Divers searching for a stolen car
on the floor of an Army Corps of Engineers
impoundment, discovered a roadbed, a silo, a watering
trough, and the foundations of a dairy barn.
Efforts to raise the farm proved unsuccessful.
A number of small Tennessee farms were traced
to a land-developer’s safe deposit box
in a mid-state bank after a bank official
entered the vault to investigate roosters
crowing and cows bawling inside the box.
The Agriculture Agency of the state
recently procured a helicopter to aid
in the disappearing farm phenomenon.
“People come in here every week,” the agency head,
Claude Bullock, reports, “whole farm families on tractors,
claiming their small farm has disappeared.”
Running the Small Farms arms of the agency
is not just a job for Bullock, born and brought up
on a small Tennessee farm himself. “We’re doing
the best we can,” says Bullock, a softspoken man
with a brow that furrows like a well-plowed field
over blue eyes looking at you like farm ponds.
“But nowadays,” he adds, “you can load a farm,
especially these small ones, onto a floppy disk.
Some of these will hold half a dozen farms. You just store them away.
So they’re hard to locate with a helicopter.”
Bullock’s own small farm, a thirty-acre
remnant of the “old home place,” disappeared
fourteen months ago, shortly before
he joined the Small Farms arm of the agency.
—Jim Wayne Miller
Kentucky Poet Laureate
PROLOGUE
I believe the future is simply the past, entered through another gate.
—PINERO
On the mountain a child was crying.
Nora Bonesteel sat in the rocking chair by her fireplace, piecing together the squares of a Jerusalem quilt, half listening to her visitor’s recital of the week’s events: a toddler’s birthday party, a potluck supper at the rescue squad, an ailing neighbor. Nora liked to hear about the doings in the valley, even though age and inclination kept her close to home.
It had become a ritual now that every Sunday night, after evening church service, Jane Arrowood would drive her home, and the two of them would sit together, sewing and talking, a widow and a lifelong spinster, passing the long hours of Sunday evening together.
Nora’s coarse-veined hands were steady in the dim light, feeling their way along the even stitches of the quilt. She barely looked at the scraps of colored cotton as she sewed, and she spoke no more than usual, but every time Jane ran out of things to say, Nora would get her talking again, asking more questions about flowers or recipes to fill the silence. This was so unlike her that several times Jane nearly asked her if anything was the matter, but she told herself that the old woman was lonely, and that she missed the sound of a human voice.
Outside, a night wind rattled the shutters and set oak branches tapping against the tin roof. Puffed clouds scudded across the moon and back, patterning the landscape alternately light and dark.
Jane Arrowood finished telling about the early crocuses in her garden, and held her sewing up to the light of the table lamp to examine her stitches. “Listen to that gale out there,” she said, nodding toward the curtained windows. “You’d never know it was spring.”
Nora Bonesteel closed her eyes and listened for a moment. “It’s early days yet,” she said. “We might be in for another snowfall before the weather breaks.” Then noting the stricken look on her visitor’s face, she added, “But not tonight, Jane. It’s just a wind tonight. Nothing to hinder you getting home. I’ll get us some tea.”
“Oh, don’t trouble yourself. I’ll have to go soon. It’s nearly ten o’clock now, and Spencer always calls to make sure I’ve gotten home all right.” Jane Arrowood stood up and stretched. She could not call her son, the sheriff, to tell him she’d be late. There were no telephone lines strung up Ashe Mountain. Nora Bonesteel was its only resident. Her house was warm and comfortable, and from its picture windows you could see ridge after ridge of cloud-streaked mountains, stretching away in the distance, ranging from green to blue and finally to purple on the horizon, where it was hard to tell mountains from clouds. If you looked out that window when the trees were bare, you could see a black line that had once been the Wilderness Road, that great route westward, where more than two centuries ago, pioneers had taken their wagons through the Carolina mountains to the fertile Tennessee valleys beyond. Tonight, though, the windows were slabs of black shrouded in heavy curtains. Jane Arrowood could see nothing beyond them. But Nora Bonesteel still could.
“Don’t worry about the sheriff,” she said, ambling toward the kitchen. “He’ll be late. He has enough on his mind tonight, I expect.”
Her visitor sat back down. She did not question the old woman’s statement. Nora Bonesteel knew things. Even when the mountain was dark, even with the radio off and no telephone for miles, Nora Bonesteel knew. “I will have that tea, after all,” said Jane. After a moment she added, “Spencer’s all right, isn’t he?”
She heard the sound of a kettle being filled, and the clatter of crockery. “Other people’s troubles!” Nora called out from the kitchen. “He’s doing his job, I expect. Somebody with car trouble, likely as not, and won’t they be glad to see that patrol car pull up behind them. Your Spencer is an angel unawares.”
Jane Arrowood smiled at this biblical phrase, picturing the sheriff’s reaction to it. “A dark angel,” he would no doubt reply, thinking of all the sorrow he had to bring into people’s lives, with warrants and subpoenas and news about loved ones who weren’t coming home. It would please him tonight if he could balance out the troubles with an act of kindness. Jane did not doubt that when she spoke to him later that night, he would tell her a story of a driver stranded somewhere on a country road near Hamelin, and she would listen without letting on that she already knew, because Nora Bonesteel’s gift of the Sight made Spencer uneasy, as it did most folks in the valley. It wasn’t something Nora talked about if she could help it, but Jane had known Nora all her life, which was more than sixty years, and there was an easiness between them that allowed for an occasional unguarded remark, provided that it was of no consequence. Jane didn’t talk to her son about Nora’s visions, though. Spencer was determined not to believe in such things, and any evidence to the contrary only annoyed him.
Jane picked up her embroidery again, but a sound outside made her drop the cloth and hold her breath, as she strained to hear above the wind. “Miz Bonesteel, what’s that noise outside?” she called out.
“I hear the wind,” said Nora Bonesteel.
“No. Listen hard.” She waited, motionless, until the sound came again. “Did you hear that? It sounds like crying, doesn’t it? Almost like a child.”
“There’s a painter somewhere over the ridge,” said Nora. She stood in the doorway, watching Jane. “Hunters see a glimpse of him now and again. Maybe he’s out tonight.”
Jane Arrowood shook her head. “I know the scream of a mountain lion. It can freeze your stomach to your backbone, but it doesn’t sound like that. What I’m hearing now is a low keening sound, the way a child cries when it’s cold or hungry. Don’t you hear it?”
“No.” The old woman turned and went back into the kitchen.
“It was probably the wind,” said Jane as the silence stretched on. “Sometimes, when I’m alone upstairs and the wind whips around the trees and the tin roof, I could swear I hear voices out there. It sounds like a choir singing in Latin, and I can hear it so plain I can even hum the tune. Just the wind, though.”
She went back to her needlework, an embroidered pillowcase to be offered at the women’s club craft fair in June. The wind had died down, and now she could hear the whistling of the kettle, the click of the stove being shut off, and the plop of boiling water into the rose-patterned teapot that had belonged to Nora’s grandmother. Jane listened for the swish of Nora’s slippers on the pine floor, but for a moment all was quiet. Then she heard footsteps from another direction—as if someone were running across Nora’s front porch, but the tread was light, like that of a small animal—or a child.
“There’s somebody out there,” said Jane aloud.
Nora Bonesteel stood in the doorway, holding the tea tray. “No,” she said.
“But I heard it! Just now when the wind died down. It was as if something little came bounding up on the porch.” Jane walked toward the door.
“Don’t open it!” Nora called out. She finished quietly, “Jane, no one is there. Let’s sit back down now, before the tea gets cold.”
For the next hour, while the wind howled and the branches rattled against the tin roof and the crying rose to a long wail, almost indistinguishable from the storm, the two women sewed. Nora Bonesteel hummed the tune of an old hymn, and Jane kept her eyes on her needlework, willing herself not to hear the cries, the footsteps, and finally the knocking.
No one is there
, Nora had told her. Jane did not look toward the dark windows for fear that what was not there would be staring back at her.
