Dovey Coe Read online

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  for clifton and jack

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The author would like to thank the following people for their support and encouragement: Caitlyn Dlouhy, Virginia Holman, Alice Johnston, Nancy Reisman, Del and Jane O’Roark, and Jack and Melvene Dowell.

  chapter 1

  My name is Dovey Coe, and I reckon it don’t matter if you like me or not. I’m here to lay the record straight, to let you know them folks saying I done a terrible thing are liars. I aim to prove it, too. I hated Parnell Caraway as much as the next person, but I didn’t kill him.

  I know plenty of folks who thought about it once or twice, after Parnell shot a BB gun at their cats or broke their daughters’ hearts. They’re the same ones who go around now making out like Parnell was an angel, a regular pillar of society. The truth is, there ain’t no one in Indian Creek who didn’t believe Parnell Caraway was the meanest, vainest, greediest man who ever lived. Seventeen years old and rotten to the core.

  Of course, his daddy being the richest man in town meant Parnell could do about whatever he pleased without anybody saying boo back to him. Most of the folks who live in town rent their houses from Homer Caraway and buy their dry goods from his store, and they know better than to cross him. You so much as look at Homer Caraway wrong and he can make your life right miserable.

  Every time I start complaining about having to walk a half mile down the mountain to school every morning, I remember how lucky we are to own our land. It ain’t much—four acres, a five-room house, and a barn—but it keeps us Coes from being beholden to Homer Caraway, and I’d walk ten miles to school to keep it that way.

  I know it pained Parnell that we weren’t indebted to his daddy. Maybe if we had been, my sister Caroline would have married him the way he kept asking her to do. Caroline Coe was the one thing Parnell wanted he couldn’t have. As conceited as Parnell was, it took him a long time to figure that out.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself, which I do from time to time. You probably want to know where I’m from and who my family is, the particulars folks tend to be interested in.

  Like I said, my name is Dovey Coe. There have been Coes living in Indian Creek, North Carolina, since the beginning of time, and I expect there always will be. We’re mountain folk, and once you been living in the mountains for a while, it’s hard to live anywhere else. You can walk over to the graveyard behind the church in town and see Coes going as far back as 1844. The most recent stone belongs to my Granddaddy Caleb, who passed on two years ago, when I was ten. It says: HERE LIES CALEB COE, LOVING HUSBAND TO REBECCA COE, FATHER TO MATTHEW, LUKE, AND JOHN COE. BORN MAY 17, 1861. DIED DECEMBER 2, 1926. MAY HE WALK WITH THE LORD.

  John Coe is my daddy. He’s what they call a jack-of-all-trades, meaning he can fix anything you got that’s broke and some things that ain’t. Folks bring him their busted radios, their haywire toasters, their broke-down automobiles, and Daddy tightens a screw here, reconnects a wire there, and makes it good as new. Them who have money to pay give him a dollar or two, depending on the size of the job, and them who don’t have a dime in their pocket work out a barter. When Gaither Sparks’s carburetor died, we got a new pig and a pound of sugar. It evens out, as Daddy is all the time saying.

  Mama grew up over in Cane Creek Holler, not two miles from here. She still hums the songs she learned when she was a little girl while she works around the house, and she has taught many of them songs to me. I try my best to remember them the right way, and I always pretend like I’m paying attention when she’s telling me all the things she says a young lady ought to know.

  Besides Caroline, I got me an older brother named Amos, age of thirteen, and he loves good adventure as much as I do. We spend a good portion of our days running around on Katie’s Knob, hunting arrowheads or hunks of crystal quartz, tracking all manner of wild animals and generally having a big time.

  We live in the house my daddy grew up in, and every morning I look out upon the same mountains my daddy looked out upon when he was a child. I like sitting on the porch watching the summer evenings fall across the valley, listening to Daddy pick old tunes on his guitar. I enjoy the cozy feel of sitting next to the woodstove when there’s a frosty bite in the air.

  There’s at least a million other things that all add up to my good life here, more things than I can say or even remember, they’re so natural to me now.

  That’s why it’s hard to believe they might send me away from here.

  It’s not that I blamed Caroline for this whole mess. I know deep inside it ain’t exactly her fault. But on top of things, it sure feels that way.

  chapter 2

  “I reckon Parnell Caraway would do anything for you, including lay down and die,” I said to Caroline one afternoon back in early summer, when Mama’s garden was starting to push out every sort of vegetable known to mankind and it seemed like all we did was one chore after the other. Parnell was on my mind that morning, as I had been thinking about how rich folks like him and his sister, Paris, probably never had to do a single chore in their lives.

  We was sitting in the shade of the front porch shelling peas for supper. I had finished shelling the peas in my basket and was starting on Caroline’s, which was still half full. Caroline was always making plans in her head, and doing something so ordinary as shelling peas didn’t make much of a claim on her attention.

  “Good Lord, Dovey,” Caroline said, sounding like I was too addle-brained to be listened to. “Parnell don’t care no more for me than he cares for a chicken.”

  She ran a hand through her dark hair, her cheeks reddening. From the look in her eyes, I’d say she right enjoyed the idea of some boy laying down and dying for her, not that she’d admit it.

  Caroline was sixteen, a whole four years older than myself, but a lot of folks said I acted like the older sister because I weren’t afraid of anything and I’d speak my mind when it was called for. They sure didn’t mistake me for the prettier sister.

  She was so pretty, sometimes I could hardly look at her. It was like she had a white light around her setting off her long dark hair and big green eyes. Daddy said Caroline could stop an army of men with them eyes of hers, and I believed it. I have gray eyes myself, and there ain’t enough about them to comment upon.

  “I reckon Parnell is low-down enough to love a chicken,” I teased her, wanting to stay in her good graces. There was no fun to be had when Caroline fell into one of them moods of hers.

  My chicken remark got her to laughing. “Ain’t you something,” she said, swatting my knee, “going on that way about chickens and love.”

  Caroline stood up, brushing peas from her green cotton skirt, and went into the house. I would have bet you one dollar right then and there she was going to go lie across the bed and dream her big dreams about leaving for faraway places without giving a second thought to Parnell Caraway, even though he had been trying to get her to spend time with him for nearly a year.

  You see, by the time Caroline had turned fourteen, she had come up with a plan for her life, having decided that living here in Indian Creek was not for her. She wanted to get herself a taste of the world and see what lay beyond these mountains. So she decided she would go to teachers college over in Boone.

&nbs
p; She figured that when she finished she’d be able to get a good teaching job in Asheville or maybe even down in Charlotte or Raleigh, and send a little money home to Mama and Daddy. The rest she would spend on pretty clothes and weekend trips to interesting spots. For a long time, Parnell’s attentions didn’t seem to affect her in the least bit.

  I sat finishing up the peas Caroline had left, looking out over the yard and into the woods beyond. To my way of thinking, if you was born a Coe, then Indian Creek was where you belonged. Coes had lived in this town going on forever, and we were as much a part of it as Katie’s Knob and Cane Creek. But as usual Caroline had figured things differently from the way I did.

  I wondered some about what it would be like to be Caroline, to have boys coming at you this way and that, their hearts in their hands. Not that I was all that interested in boys, mind you. Nor did I wish to be some raving beauty, since my interests did not lie in the area of romance. Just sometimes I got curious, is all.

  One morning Caroline woke me up right early, holding a mug of hot chocolate under my nose, a guaranteed way to get me up of a morning, as Caroline known better than most.

  “Dovey, honey, let’s go into town and see what they’ve got at the farmers market.” Caroline give me a smile that said, please, oh, please. It had an effect on me, and I jumped right up and started pulling on my dungarees and blouse.

  It was a bright Saturday morning, and as usual Caroline was half afraid to go down the mountain by herself. All sorts of wild animals lived in these mountains; we could hear them talking to each other at night, and it was enough to scare a person sitting on the safety of their porch. During the day, though, it was real rare to see a bear or a cougar. I weren’t bothered by the thought of roaming through the woods by myself or with Amos to look for the roots we sold to doctors who lived off the mountain. But Caroline was another story. She was sure she was going to get eaten by a mountain lion unless I was there to beat it off with a stick.

  By the time we got to town, Caroline had forgotten all about the wild things. Her mind was on the market and what she might find there. Starting in the spring, farmers brought their families to town and set up a market at the end of King Street, which was the street that run through the middle of things. They sold a variety of goods, not just their produce. You’d see tables set up to sell breads and cakes, quilts of every pattern—Water Wheel, Goose Wing, and Dove in the Window—wooden ducks and pups you could pull along with a string, jars full of marbles, jars full of buttons, an old spinning wheel or a quilting frame that had been gathering dust in somebody’s barn, just every sort of thing, and every once in a while you’d run into a veritable treasure.

  Caroline and I ambled through the farmers market, enjoying the good smells and the sight of the many fine things we would buy if we had the money. We stopped in front of a table that held among its fineries a silver-plated mirror and a steel-blade, shiny, red-cased pocketknife. I’d been wanting a pocketknife since the first time I seen one in the Sears and Roebuck catalog. There it sat in the picture, shiny and a little dangerous looking, though I didn’t point out that aspect of it to Mama. I could think of a hundred ways of using it, from hacking weeds in the garden to defending myself against a cougar if I ever come across one.

  I tried to get Mama interested in the idea of getting me that pocketknife for Christmas, but she weren’t having none of it. Mama was trying to wean me from my more boyish ways. “It ain’t ladylike to cross your legs that way,” she’d tell me, or, “I’m going to make you give me a nickel for every time I see you spitting in the yard.” I’d see her frown at me from the porch when I set out to go fishing with Amos at the pond out back, and she was all the time telling Daddy I was getting too old to help him fix up cars in the barn.

  Caroline kept picking up the mirror and turning it in her hand, trying not to admire her reflection in it too much. Me, I was busy testing the weight of the pocketknife in my hand. It felt just right. The only problem was it cost fifty cents, and I only had a nickel.

  A boy who looked to be about sixteen, with spotty skin and an Adam’s apple you couldn’t help but stare at, stood behind the table and kept his eyes glued to Caroline. Anybody could tell he thought he’d died and gone to heaven from the way his mouth fell half open, a slack smile curling up the corner of his lips.

  “That there’s a pretty mirror for a real pretty girl, if you don’t mind me saying so,” is what he finally managed to say, pointing a bony finger at his table and looking right proud that he’d gotten that much out of his mouth.

  Caroline aimed them green eyes of hers directly at him and laughed that laugh of hers that hits you like a cool drink of water on an August afternoon. “Well, ain’t you so sweet to say that? I was thinking how fine this would look on my dresser at home.”

  The boy begun to look a little peaked, like he was thinking of Caroline sitting in her nightgown in front of her dresser table. He swallowed a few times, that Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in a way that was right fascinating.

  “It’s too bad it’s so costly,” Caroline went on, swaying her hips a bit like she were dancing to a song only she could hear, weaving her spell. “I just don’t have two dollars to spend.”

  “Well, my mama might have my hide, but I’ll tell you what. I’ll let you have it for one dollar even, just because you’re so pretty.”

  Caroline shook her head sweetly. “You are the nicest thing. Most boys as handsome as you ain’t half so nice.”

  I was getting a little bored with all the pleasantries going back and forth between the two of them. I started humming a loud tune and bumping into Caroline’s side with my hip.

  “This is my little sister, Dovey,” Caroline said, introducing me to the boy, who give me a quick nod before getting back to the business of my sister. “She sure does seem to fancy that pocketknife.”

  I had lost all patience with their little courtship. “Come on, Caroline, let’s go. You ain’t got the money for the mirror, I ain’t got the money for the pocketknife, and Mama wants us home in time for dinner.”

  Caroline looked sorrowfully at her would-be suitor and said, “I guess Dovey’s right, we really should be going.”

  Before you could say Davy Crockett, the boy asked me, “How much money you got?”

  “I got one U.S. nickel, and that ain’t enough to buy anything you’re selling.”

  “Don’t be so sure.” Before you know it, he’d wrapped the mirror and the pocketknife in brown paper and said, “That will be five cents, please, and could I interest you pretty ladies in a lemonade, my treat?”

  When Mama saw my pocketknife that afternoon, she put up a fuss, but Daddy convinced her that a girl who spends as much time on the mountain as I do needs a good knife. He was a touch curious about how me and Caroline had gotten such a fine bargain on our purchases, but we just left that topic alone, and soon enough Daddy got to thinking on other matters.

  Sometimes I weren’t sure that it was right for Caroline to act the way she did with men, getting them to do every little thing for her, especially since she could get real sensitive about people thinking that she weren’t nothing more than a pretty face. But if ever I started to judging her too harshly, I just took out that knife and remembered that she weren’t the only one who profited from her ways.

  “You just be careful with that thing, Dovey,” Mama told me as I was fixing to go out the door after dinner. Me and Amos was going to check some of our traps up on Katie’s Knob. “I’m good with a needle, but I don’t know how to sew fingers back on to a hand.”

  Caroline was sitting at the kitchen table polishing up her silver mirror with a dish towel. “Try not to kill anyone with that thing, Dovey,” she warned me in a joking manner. “I’d sure hate to have to come bail you out of jail.”

  “Caroline, where on earth do you get the notion to say such a thing?” Mama scolded. Mama was real sensitive about bloodshed and violence. Her youngest brother, Cecil, had been shot and killed in the fields of Argonne,
France, in the Great War, and Mama still hadn’t got over that.

  “Oh, Mama,” Caroline said, sounding like she weren’t taking Mama the least bit seriously. Then she started humming some song I’d never heard before. The music of her voice trailed me out the door and up the mountain path.

  chapter 3

  Amos had gotten way ahead of me by the time I got out the door. He known every rock, every gopher hole, every twist of the dirt path that wound up Katie’s Knob to all the good and secret places that the mountain held, and he could move along it like a slip of wind. I had trekked that path many a time myself, but Mama’s hand was always reaching out to pull me back into the life of proper things and tiny stitches and delicate sighs. Amos was older than me by a year, and he was allowed to roam freely, so that he known that mountain like he known his own face in the mirror.

  When I finally caught up with him, he was kneeling down to examine some animal tracks that veered from the path off into the woods. Tom and Huck, Amos’s dogs, had already burrowed through a thick growth of vines and weeds to follow the scent of whichever creature had been there. I figured it to be a deer by the V of the track, and when I said this to Amos, he nodded and rose. We had no interest in deer this time of year. It was roots and herbs we could sell for medicinals that we had an eye peeled for.

  Amos clapped out his signal for Tom and Huck, and the dogs come running back to us. Their yellow fur was full of burrs and spotted with red clay, and they was panting from what seemed to me to be the sheer joy of the chase.

  I don’t know if I can even explain what a comfort them dogs were to me. I had made Amos my responsibility from the time we were little ones, but after Mama started her campaign to make a lady out of me, I couldn’t always keep him in my sights. I pointed this out to her again and again, but she weren’t having none of it. “Amos can get along by his own self, Dovey,” she’d lecture me. “Let him grow up some.” But not once had Mama bloodied her knuckles on some fool of a boy who’d come up behind Amos and made crazy faces, whereas I bore many a scar.