Homecoming in Mossy Creek Page 10

  Win led them both through the door that led to my newly renovated upstairs apartment.

  Though the fare sounded mundane, I knew that “grilled cheese and tomato soup” to Win meant smoked Gruyere on Artisan bread and soup made from fresh tomatoes. All the ingredients were upstairs. He’d brought them over last night. He often cooked for Matt and me in my new kitchen, which Dan McNeil had completed two months ago. We just as often ate at Win’s house. All four of us. As if we were a family.

  Judge Campbell and the Clay ladies left very quickly after that.

  “Are you nuts?” Ingrid asked when I came back from locking the door and dimming the lights in the dining area. She stood behind the counter, chopping pecans we would use later that night in one treat or another.

  I glanced pointedly at the marble counter. “So you could chop me up, too? What kind of nut do you think I am? Pecan? Peanut? Macadamia?”

  She waved her chef’s knife at me. “A crazy nut. Maybe I should chop you up. It might bleed the stupid out of you.”

  “Gee, thanks. I think the world of you, too.”

  My sarcasm left her undaunted. “You know I love you, but if you can’t see what’s right in front of you…”

  “What?” I asked when she didn’t finish, to see if she would back down.

  I should’ve known better. “Well, then you might just lose him.”

  “Why? Because I want to take it slow? He obviously wants to take it slow, too. He hasn’t said anything about his feelings, either. Much less mentioned love.”

  The truth was, we haven’t had time. Between our jobs, my renovations and Win’s successful campaign for President of the Mossy Creek Town Council, we’d only had time for five one-on-one dates. Our together times had mostly consisted of attending some town function, grabbing a bite to eat, then putting Matt to bed. Unless we’d left him with Ingrid, which happened as often as not.

  “We haven’t even…” I couldn’t finish.

  “I know.” Ingrid said. “Who would know if not me?”

  I felt as if I had to explain. It seemed odd for a couple who has been dating for almost six months not to have been intimate. “At first, we hadn’t wanted to give Dwight a reason to question Win’s morals. We were under such a microscope.”

  Ingrid nodded in complete understanding. “What couple in Mossy Creek isn’t? But a candidate for President of the Town Council, well… Believe me, I understand.”

  “And since the election…”

  “It’s okay, you know,” Ingrid said softly. “In fact, I applaud you both for waiting. In my day, people didn’t sleep together until they were married.”

  “Matthew and I did, but only a few weeks before.”

  “It’s okay, either way,” Ingrid said. “I will love you no matter what. But… you are in love with him, aren’t you? It really does seem as obvious as the noses on your faces. Both your faces.”

  “I… I…”

  “Okay, then answer this—can you definitively say that you aren’t?”

  I thought about that for a really long moment. So long, she went back to chopping. Just as she poured another batch of nuts onto the marble slab, I answered softly, “No, I can’t.”

  PART FIVE

  The Great Time Capsule Caper

  Louise & Peggy, Friday afternoon

  Two hours and a lunch later, we took our rolled-up copy of the yellowed plot with us and drove to the site of the football stadium.

  “What on earth?” I said. I had expected bulldozers and bush hogs and such, with their attendant remoras of pickup trucks. The equipment was there, but not in use at the moment. Instead, there must have been twenty cars in the overgrown lot, some of which I recognized. They were not contractors.

  We parked beside a beige SUV. The tailgate was up and a man was standing beside it holding a shovel. Dwight Truman, our recently displaced Council President and not one of my favorite people.

  “What is all this?” Peggy said.

  “We’re here to give you a hand,” he said with that smarmy smile that I found so irritating. “Can’t have you pretty ladies digging up half of Mossy Creek looking for that capsule, now can we? You leave it to us men.” He pulled on a pair of pristine gardening gloves and walked toward the newly cleared field.

  “What capsule, Dwight?” I called after him.

  He waved a monitory finger at me. The gesture was even more irritating than the smile. “Can’t keep something like that a secret. Y’all go have you a Co-Cola and come back. Bet we’ll have it all cleaned up and waitin’ for you.”

  “So much for nobody knowing it’s missing,” I said.

  Peggy dragged me away before I could do something regrettable about that finger.

  “Bet he thinks there’s something nasty about him in that box,” I said, the moment we were out of earshot.

  “What? Evidence he cooked the books on the Homecoming decorations?”

  “Why not?” I glanced over my shoulder. “If he does find it, what odds do you give he’ll open it and commit all the secrets to memory to use in the next election?”

  “Not with all those other people watching, he won’t.”

  Since we were obviously not needed in the digging department, we unrolled the old stadium plot on the hood of my SUV, weighted it open with Diet Coke cans and started looking for ‘x marks the spot.’ So far as we could tell, there wasn’t one. “Surely somebody marked the location where they buried the thing,” Peggy said.

  “They buried it after the fire, remember,” I answered. “Everybody who could fight the fire had fought it, so they must have been worn slap-dab to a frazzle. Who knows where Amos and his friends buried the thing. They probably drove their pickup truck as far into the stadium area as they could get, dug a hole any ole where, dumped it in and drove away. They may have planned to come back the next day, but with the fire, nobody bothered. Besides, things look different at night. And they sure as heck look different twenty years later.”

  “How big is this box anyway?” Peggy asked.

  “Bigger than a bread box at any rate. But digging even a yard away from it wouldn’t necessarily uncover it.”

  “Maybe it rusted away to nothing.”

  “Nope. That I do remember. Big deal was made about how it was stainless steel lined with lead to preserve everything perfectly. Probably weighed close to a hundred pounds.”

  “This is a waste of time. We need to talk to whoever actually headed up the team that buried it.”

  Mossy Creek Gazette

  Volume VIII, No. Four • Mossy Creek, Georgia

  Have You Seen This Cow?

  by Katie Bell

  Homecoming festivities have been interrupted by a bovine emergency.

  Eddie Brady filed a “missing cow” report at the Police Station yesterday, stating that his best milker, Matilda, ran through a hole in the fence caused by last week’s storm.

  The photo below is Matilda. If you’ve seen her in the past few days, please contact Eddie or the MCPD.

  Matilda was last seen crossing South Bigelow Road by a very surprised Judge Campbell, who was returning from a law seminar in Atlanta. “She just darted out of the woods right in front of me. It was, oh, about six-thirty. She paused for an instant, as if assessing my level of danger, then scooted into the woods on the other side. If I’d known she was a runaway, I’d’ve called Eddie and Amos.”

  Until Matilda has been located, Police Chief Amos Royden asks drivers to take it down to 35 miles per hour for the first few miles south of town.

  In the meantime, Eddie is setting up a hayrack on the south leg of Mossy Creek. The pen will not only be stocked with hay, but with John McClure’s prize bull named after singer Waylon Jennings.

  “Don’t know if we’ll catch her,” McClure said. “When a cow gets away, she can
get onery and smart. But ol’ Waylon here’s gonna give it the ol’ bullish try!”

  Hunters are urged to look before they shoot!

  Bake Sale Blitz

  The reason women don’t play football is because

  eleven of them would never wear the same outfit in public.

  —Phyllis Diller

  Lucy Belle Gilreath, Thursday

  “No, no. More like this,” Inez said. My wizened grandmother stretched out her arm, leading with the heel of one arthritic hand, and cradled her oxygen bottle in the other, pigskin-style. She was striking the Heisman trophy pose for the benefit of young John Wesley McCready, just turned ten years old and football-crazy.

  If there was a more unlikely Heisman contender than my pulmonary-challenged, five-foot-tall grandmother, I couldn’t imagine him or her. John Wesley, on the other hand, had potential as a future player. The stocky little guy was beside himself with excitement over the Homecoming game against Harrington Academy.

  “Are you and your Grandma Inez going to the game, Miss Lucy Belle?” he asked me.

  “We sure are,” I said. “We’re going to get there extra early so we can sit on the 50-yard line.”

  Mossy Creek hasn’t had a Homecoming Game in over twenty years—mostly because we haven’t had a high school since that fateful fire way back then. Even though I’d been a graduate of Bigelow High School, it was because I had no choice. Mossy Creek High School didn’t exist back then. So I was really looking forward to this game. The bake sale was part of Homecoming Week. Since it was to benefit the high school Booster Club, hopefully it would be a fun and profitable part of it.

  The weather was crisp and clear here on the town square, which was decorated with the school colors and all the other fiery hues of autumn in the South. The leaves in the old oaks were a blazing crimson and gold, and orange pumpkins were stacked high beside crates of red, ripe apples.

  The smells of the bake sale were enough to make your mouth water. Fresh cakes and pies, plus all manner of confections—especially fall treats like candied and caramel apples—vied for buyers with savory standbys like boiled peanuts and crispy pork rinds.

  Somebody’s boom box played the Mossy Creek High School band’s rendition of the beloved fight song, and you could hear old friends greeting each other over the squeals of little kids in the ring toss booth and the laughter of older children trying to dunk their favorite teacher in the dunk tank.

  John Wesley had begun the afternoon helping his mother set up the booth for the Mount Gilead Methodist Church. After awhile, his mama worried that his non-stop questions were fraying the nerves of the other members of the ladies’ auxiliary, so she told him to take a walk. John Wesley, you see, is blessed with an inquisitive nature and the gift of gab. I considered him a kindred spirit and wasn’t in the least troubled by his philosophical queries.

  So after he was banished by the Methodists, he volunteered his services to me and Grandma Inez. As he stacked the jars of chow-chow into smart pyramids, he shared his gridiron goals and asked us our thoughts on the game and favorite players.

  “Herschel Walker,” Grandma intoned dramatically. “Now there was a star. He had class. Never celebrated in the end zone; just handed the ball back to the ref when he scored a touchdown. And he won the Heisman for the Georgia Bulldogs in 1982. Now you try that Heisman pose.”

  John Wesley tucked his football under one arm and lunged forward, mimicking the famous collegiate trophy stance. Inez and I applauded our approval.

  “Why do they call Harrington Academy a prep school?” John Wesley wanted to know.

  “Because that’s where they prepare you to be a snob,” Inez said.

  Inez was particularly sensitive to snobbery. She reserved her most venomous populist ire for folks she considered uppity and—as she termed it—“forgot where they came from.” People like her arch-nemesis, Ardaleen Bigelow. She and her cousin Ardaleen had been engaging in games of one-upmanship for as far back as anybody can remember.

  The last two anti-Ardaleen stunts she’d enlisted me in had almost landed me in the pokey, so I’d vowed to keep my nose clean in the future. I was getting a little long in the tooth to let my grandma talk me into illegal plots, although the siren song of her schemes was hard to resist.

  “I’m playing in the Rotarian league,” John Wesley said proudly.

  I opened a box of fried pies for the youngster to arrange on the linen-draped table I’d covered with butcher paper. “Offense or defense?”

  “Defense. I love to hit!”

  “I’ll bet you do,” I said as I caught him eyeing the baked goods. “Here, arrange these pies across the front. And pick one out for yourself. A growing defenseman has to keep his strength up.”

  Inez put her oxygen bottle back into the harness which she wore around her neck like a metal papoose. Decades of smoking unfiltered Camels will do that to you. She was still pretty spry all-in-all. In fact she was so busy cooking and filling orders for our chow-chow business, she’d lost enough weight to get around a lot better than she used to.

  “John Wesley, try one of those pies with the scalloped edges and tell me what you think,” Inez said.

  After a moment’s deliberation he picked the biggest one and took a bite. “Chocolate!”

  “That’s her specialty,” I said. “Grandma makes a paste out of cocoa, sugar and butter and uses that in the pies instead of the usual fruit filling. She heaps it onto the rolled-out pastry, folds it over, seals the edges and fries it up real crisp.”

  “It’s great, Miss Inez,” John Wesley said. “Whatever you’re charging for ’em ain’t enough.”

  “Why thank you, young man,” Grandma said proudly. “I won the bake-off at the county fair a few weeks ago with that recipe.”

  “She beat out her cousin Ardaleen again,” I said.

  “The governor’s mom?” John Wesley asked between bites.

  “The very same,” Grandma said, a competitive gleam in her eye.

  “She’s on quite a winning streak, especially where Ardaleen is concerned,” I said. “And you can bet that cousin of hers is going to pull out all the stops next year.” The two of them were cut out of the same ornery, competitive cloth, but I wasn’t going to say that out loud. Not around Grandma.

  “I’ve got to be ready,” Inez said seriously. “I’m going to be doing some talent scouting here at the bake sale.”

  “What does that mean?” John Wesley asked.

  “It means she’s going to be tasting all the samples she can get her hands on for ideas on a new baked item or a pickle or preserve for next fall’s entry,” I said.

  John Wesley looked troubled. “You mean Miss Inez is going to steal someone’s else’s recipe?”

  “Oh, no, child,” Inez said. “I’m just looking for what you might call...inspiration. And scoping out the competition. There’s a lot of good cooks in this county. Most are better than Ardaleen, and several are almost as good as me. Why, I’m convinced Ardaleen’s maid Ruthie does most of the work behind her entries anyway.”

  “Grandma doesn’t believe in false modesty. Or false anything else for that matter,” I said to John Wesley.

  “Just keeping it real,” Inez said with a shrug.

  I sometimes thought it was Grandma’s ongoing feud with her cousin that kept her alive and kicking. Some elderly people live for their grandchildren, their hobbies, or whatever else they held dear. Inez, in her mid-80s now, lived to kick butt, pure and simple. She was as contrary as a mule and would argue with a sign post. But she was also a hell of a lot of fun. Even though the fair had only been over for a couple of weeks, she was thinking toward next year. That’s what you call focus.

  She’d already been sniffing and tasting around the other booths as they were being set up. Samples of pickles, preserves and baked goods would be given out rig
ht and left and she’d make sure she tried them all. Right now she was peering down the walkway, eyeing a table being set up about five booths down from us. She wore her customary pull-on stretch jeans and the vintage Mossy Creek High School hoodie sweatshirt she got out whenever the weather got nippy. “Hog-killing time,” she called it.

  “I think I’m going to mosey on down yonder,” she said. “I heard someone say that Clementine Carlisle’s apple butter may be good enough to ease my chow-chow out of contention in the condiment competition at next year’s fair. I’ve got to scope it out, see if I can find out any secret ingredients. It’s starting to get crowded in here, anyways. I’m going to keep things on the down low.”

  “The low down,” I corrected with a sigh. My aged, lily-white and Lilliputian grandmother had developed a fondness for hip-hop slang, and it just doesn’t get any funnier than that. Unless it’s her notion that she could sneak up on anyone unnoticed. Even though she was short, she was built like a bowling ball and came on just as strong. In the interest of skulking around incognito, she pulled the hood of her sweatshirt over her head right down to her black and birdlike little eyes, pulled the drawstring really tight and tied it in a bow.

  Off she went, her cherubic face tightly cinched up in green fleece with her breathing tube strapped across her nose, her oxygen bottle slung over her shoulder. She could use the same clever disguise at Halloween in two weeks and call herself a maniacal Martian munchkin. As she disappeared into the gathering crowd, John Wesley and I just looked at each other and shook our heads.

  “I’m glad you’re interested in football,” I said. “But what about academics, John Wesley? Are you still doing well in school?”

  “Sure am. I’ve got straight A’s so far. I have to write a paper for social studies about our Southern culture, so I’ve decided to write it on Homecoming.”

  “Good choice. Homecoming is about as Southern an event as there is—besides rattlesnake roundups, Brunswick stew cook-offs and tent revivals. What are you going to say on the subject of Homecoming?” I asked.