Autumn Winifred Oliver Does Things Different Read online

  “Hi.”

  His voice was deeper than I’d expected, kinda froggy. He plunked into the bench too close to me. He was all sticky and steamy, like hot summer rain.

  Mama was chewing the fat with big fat Aunt Lydia, to her left. This was my chance to set things straight. I propped my feet up on the bench in front of me and whispered out of the corner of my mouth, “Look, I know my mama told you I’d show you around, but I’m not much for sidekicks. Got it?”

  Mama knocked my feet off the bench. Cody’s face pulled to one side, and I couldn’t tell if he was grimacing or grinning.

  Gramps rapped on the blackboard with his knuckles. “Welcome, folks, welcome! So, let’s get started.” He leaned over, placing his hands atop his knees, and stood in a stoop, like we were a bunch of little kids he was talking to. “What would you say to working half the time for twice the money?” His voice dropped to a husky whisper, as if he was letting us in on some big secret.

  No one answered. This meeting was duller than watching paint dry. I pulled an apple from my pocket and bit into it with a huge crunch. “I’d say folks’d be crazy to say no to that,” I said, and a chunk of apple flew out of my mouth. Mama dug her elbow into my ribs.

  Gramps flung his wrist at Tilly McBroom. “Tilly? You got a good sixty years under your belt.”

  “Fifty!” Tilly shot back.

  I snorted, and when I did, apple shot up my nose.

  Gramps ignored me huffing and hacking and Mama pounding me on the back. “Fifty,” he said, rolling his eyes. “You want to keep plowing those same fields the rest of your years? Selling honey and molasses off your back porch to tourists sure would be easier than plowing the back forty, right, Tilly?”

  Tilly shrugged.

  “And Beef,” Gramps said, spinning to the hulk of a man in the front row. “You can fix anything with moving parts, right?”

  I stopped hacking long enough to sputter, “Ol’ Beef’s the best!”

  “Autumn . . .,” Mama said under her breath.

  Beef grinned and winked at me. “You got that right.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to get your hands on one of them fancy automobile engines?” Gramps asked him.

  Beef nodded hungrily.

  “With this national park, you can do those things,” Gramps said. He crossed his arms over his chest and a smug look overtook his face, like he’d made his point and that was that.

  “Uh, Tom?” Uncle John Too eased his hand in the air. “How exactly is a national park gonna let us do those things?” A few others in the crowd nodded.

  Gramps huffed, like he was going to have to explain this all over again. “When the Great Smoky Mountains National Park opens next year, the park boundaries will stretch down to the northeast corner of the Cove.” Gramps raised his eyebrows at Colonel Chapman in the back of the room. I turned to look at him: every last hair was combed neatly into place, and his suit was as crisp as paper. What a dude! The colonel nodded. Cody shifted beside me.

  “So us in the Cove is in a lucky spot,” Gramps said. He grabbed a hunk of chalk and drew a rough map on the blackboard: two circles, barely overlapping. I gathered that the large circle on top was the park and the small circle at the bottom was the Cove.

  “The people visiting the park—all them tourists—are going to need places to sleep, eat, and get gasoline for their autos.” He drew arrows going up through the Cove and into the park. I guessed those arrows were supposed to be the droves of visitors entering the park. He dropped the chalk on the teacher’s desk. “The money is coming right to our doorsteps. Ain’t that so, Colonel?”

  Everyone turned to look at Colonel Chapman, who nodded coolly. Cody shifted again. I got the impression his uncle made him downright itchy.

  “We all stay in our houses, even keep farming if we want,” Gramps said. “So see, nothing will change, unless you want to rake in a ton of extra cash money.”

  “That’s it?” big fat Aunt Lydia whined, and her jowls jiggled. “That’s why we slogged through this downpour? To learn nothing will change?”

  Jeez. How’s that any different? Nothing’s changed in the Cove for a million years. I looked at Gramps’s map a little closer. “Hey!” I shouted, and leapt up. “That’s a right nice depiction of a black widow devouring her young!”

  The crowd bust out laughing. Now the meeting was hopping! Mama took me by the elbow and led me toward the back door. But as she did, something caught my ear: the sound of teeth sucking.

  I’d come to discover that Gramps always sucks his teeth before he stretches the truth. Pop calls this a “tell,” ’cause it tells you when someone is bluffing. I looked back over my shoulder as Mama pulled me to the door.

  Gramps was up front nodding and sucking his teeth to beat all. He was getting all worked up over this park, and I had no idea why. “Yep. Guess you’re right, Lydia. Nothing will change. So if none of you objects, come on up here and sign this little document that says you’re all in favor of a national park in east Tennessee.” He tapped an ink pen on a piece of paper lying on the desk.

  No one else seemed to know that teeth sucking was Gramps’s tell, ’cause a line formed around that paper lickety-split. “Wait a second!” I yelled, but Mama was shoving me out the door onto the soggy front stoop.

  “Get outside now, Autumn. You’ve said your piece.”

  As the door eased shut, I watched Colonel Chapman and Gramps shake hands while my neighbors signed in favor of a national park. That old geezer is up to something, and I’m going to find out what.

  “You wanna share my umbrella?”

  Right after I ditch Cody.

  The following day was a Sunday, and Mama decided that Gramps needed some churching.

  “I ain’t been to church in years. I reckon the Lord done took me off the roll sheet,” Gramps grumbled.

  “The Lord don’t take nobody off the roll sheet,” Mama said, and swatted his arm with her Bible. “Get dressed.”

  So we put on our Sunday bests, grabbed our birth Bibles, and lined up at the door. There Gramps stood, still in his overalls, empty-handed.

  “Daddy, where’s your Bible?”

  Gramps shrugged, and I thought Mama might pop. “You don’t know where your Bible is? My word, Daddy!” She marched back into our makeshift bedroom, retrieved her marriage Bible for him, and thrust the well-worn book at him.

  We loaded into the wagon, and Gramps steered us toward the Missionary Baptist Church. “And we’re all gonna sit together today, like a family,” Mama said as the wagon crunched onto the gravel lot below the church.

  “What? But I been sitting with Shirley and Linda and Mable since—”

  “No lip, Katie. Today we sit together.”

  And so we filed into our pew: first Mama, then Gramps, then Katie, then me. I didn’t mind so much, ’cause I always sit with Mama in church, but Katie drooped like a mushroom. I tried to cheer her up by scratching funny faces into the dry skin on my knee, but she just slumped down further.

  Just before the Right Reverend Feezell got to preaching, Cody stumbled across the threshold of the church with his aunt Matilda and plunked down right next to me. He shot me a goofy smile and pushed his glasses up his face. This kid just didn’t get it.

  “Mama!” Katie whispered. “Why does Autumn get to sit with her friends?”

  “He’s not my friend!” I whispered around her to Mama, just to make my position here clear.

  “Shhh!” Mama said. Katie and me both threw ourselves back against the pew.

  The reverend nodded toward Gramps. “Good to see some old friends today.” Gramps smirked. Then the reverend held out an uplifted palm toward Mama. “And the Lord takes care of the shepherds who bring home the lost sheep.” I thought Mama just might float off the pew. The reverend started his sermon and got all fevery and worked up over a burning bush. As he wound down, he dabbed his sweaty forehead and finished up as he always does: “Anyone have any prayer requests?”

  The usual prayers were offered
up: good crops, fat hogs, honest living that’ll please the Lord. But then Tommy Bledsoe snuck his hand in the air. Tommy Bledsoe, my sworn archenemy ever since a much-begrudged game of Stink Base.

  “I got a prayer of mourning.”

  The crowd murmured. What’s this? A prayer of mourning we knew nothing about? But the group of kids that sat around Tommy tittered.

  “Well, certainly, son. Go ahead,” said the reverend.

  “Yessir. I’d like to lift one up for the newly departed . . . Autumn Winifred Oliver.”

  Half the church busted out laughing; the other half clenched their jaws at all this cutting up in church. I myself burned all awkward until out of the corner of my eye, I saw Gramps’s shoulders shaking. Then I burned all angry. Here was my gramps—a fella who never went to church, a fella hiding something big about this park—laughing at me! In church!

  My hand shot into the air, and I leapt up before I could stop myself.

  “I’d like to offer up a prayer of thanks,” I shouted above the laughter. “I’d like to thank my gramps for all the hard work he’s done on the national park.” The laughter slowly died down. “He’s got nothing but our best interest at heart. Right, Gramps?” Every face in the church turned to focus on Gramps.

  Not even Gramps could lie in church. Surely I’d just guilted him into ’fessing up this secret of his. But instead, he just grinned and nodded and soaked up all those prayers of thanks like the reverend’s burning bush might soak up buckets of water.

  “Amen,” our neighbors said, shaking their heads in thanks. “Amen.”

  As we were filing out, Gramps pumped the reverend’s hand in a huge handshake. “Now that was the best time I ever had in a church pew.”

  4

  I do things different.

  It helps to remind

  yourself of that when the

  Cove ghosts start

  raising a ruckus.

  Thunk!

  It was sometime after sundown the next day, maybe nine-thirty or so, when we first heard it.

  Thump!

  Katie was finishing up my share of the dishes, like we’d agreed on. I was sketching Jeb, squeezing my likeness of the mutt into the blank margins of the Knoxville Sentinel. I looked up from the snoozing dog and over to Katie. Katie looked over to Mama. Mama looked over to Gramps.

  “What was that?” Mama asked, lowering her knitting and raising her eyes to the roof.

  “Sounds like—” Katie began.

  Thud!

  “A rock!” I yelled with a laugh. I ran to the one big front window, cupped my hands around my eyes, and pressed them against the pane to see into the darkness outside. Katie appeared right beside me, smudging the wavy glass, too. Who would want to rock us? What had we done now?

  Thomp!

  Boy oh boy. I bet this had to do with the park. I hadn’t yet figured out what Gramps was hiding, but somebody had. Somebody else knew Gramps was up to no good. Somebody was here to make him ’fess up.

  “Oh, Lord!” Mama jumped to her feet and joined us at the window. “I knew it. I knew it would come to this.”

  Thop!

  “Lord-a-mercy,” Mama cried, grabbing me and Katie by the elbows. “We’re being rocked. Rocked! I knew we hadn’t heard the end of you cussing like a sailor in front of all them ladies, Daddy!” She turned and pointed a finger over her shoulder at Gramps, who snarled from his rocking chair. “They’ve come to tell us to mend our sinnin’ ways!”

  Thwack!

  Mama cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled out the window. “Forgive us! Forgive us, for we oughta know better than to use the h-word—”

  “ ‘Hell,’ Martha,” Gramps muttered from his rocking chair. “I said ‘hell.’ ” Katie sputtered a giggle, and Mama pinched the back of her arm.

  Thud!

  “We oughta know better than to use the h-word in public, outside the doors of the Lord’s house. Our kind, forgiving neighbors”—this part she hollered as loud as she could—“should know that we repent. Repent!” She got to swaying and shouting so loudly that Jeb joined in, baying along like the fool dog he is. And when Jeb starts to baying, the old mutt passes the worst gas you ever did smell. Katie and me held our noses and fanned our faces as best we could. The folks outside were getting quite a show.

  “I’ll be dadburned.” Gramps jumped from his chair and grabbed his Remington Parker off the wall. He flung open the door and sprang to the edge of the front porch.

  “You stay right where you are, you cowards!” he yelled, waving the shotgun over his head like a madman. He leapt off the porch into darkness.

  After some rustling and wrestling outside and some fevery baying inside, we soon knew Gramps must’ve captured at least one of them, because we heard an awful “Ow! Ow! Ow!” grow louder and louder as it got closer and closer to the house.

  “Forgive my daddy!” Mama yelled toward the outside.

  In the doorway, the shadowy outline of my gramps appeared, silhouetted in that area where dark meets light. He looked downright magical, like how I always pictured one of them singing cowboys on the radio.

  “He who casts the first stone,” he said with a snort, and pulled a moony-eyed little booger inside by the ear.

  Cody!

  Mama hurried to the doorway and knelt before the kid, wrapping her hands around his pasty face. “Mercy heavens! Why was you rockin’ us, child? What did we do to offend the likes of you?”

  Cody looked at Mama like she was speaking Spanish. Or juggling rocks on her tongue. Takes about the same amount of skill to do both, if you ask me.

  “You think I got something to hide?” Gramps growled at him. “What is it you think I need to confess, son?”

  Cody swallowed. “Uh, nothing, sir. Just wanted Autumn to come outside, is all.” He blushed and kicked the floor with his heel. “Thought I’d get her attention like Romeo did for Juliet.” Dang it!

  Katie was rubbing that earlobe of hers so fast I thought it might catch fire. “Ooooo, Cody! Autumn here just loves a romantic.” She shoved me toward the little creep. Double dang it!

  “Fool kids oughta know better than to wander round after sunset, rockin’ their neighbors,” Gramps grumbled while remounting his shotgun. “Like to get hisself shot.”

  “Yessir,” Cody said to the floor.

  “You weren’t seeking our repentance, son?” Mama asked. Cody shook his head so hard, he looked like he might throw himself off balance. Mama knelt next to him and gently straightened his shirt at the shoulders. “ ’Cause throwing rocks at a house? It means you think the folks inside got something to regret.”

  I thought Cody might pass out with embarrassment.

  Mama cocked her head. “You not carryin’ a lantern?” she asked. Cody shook his head again. “Why, how on earth did you find your way?”

  “Wasn’t easy, ma’am.” He swallowed and his voice returned. “But the moon’s big tonight. Back in Knoxville, streetlights come on at dusk. Guess I didn’t think about how dark it’d be here after sunset.”

  I thought Mama might cry at the thought of this crazy kid wandering around the Cove at night. “My heavens, boy! That’s a mite dangerous. Does your auntie know you’re here?”

  Again, Cody shook his head at the floor. Gramps groaned.

  “Well, looks like Daddy’s gonna have to hitch up the wagon and take you back home,” Mama said, eyeballing Gramps with one of her do-it-or-else looks.

  “Oh, no, ma’am, please!” Cody breathed, and I couldn’t tell if it was because he didn’t want to be a nuisance or because he didn’t want to be alone with Gramps. “Can’t you just send word?”

  We all got a quick chuckle out of that one. “Boy, by the time we send word you’re here, we could already have you home.” She shook her head at the mere notion. “Send word!”

  Then she turned to me. “Autumn, you’re going, too.”

  Katie spit a giggle. “A moonlight ride with your boyfriend! How romantic!” She made smoochy kissy noises.

>   “Hush, you!” I hissed, but I was secretly kinda excited. After all, it wasn’t every day I got to go on a midnight ride.

  So before I knew it, Cody and I were cocooned under two of Mama’s softest quilts, lying on our backs in the rear of the cart. We passed ’neath stars that looked like hundreds of silver coins flung across a black velvet night sky. Gramps steered the team of horses across the Cove, cutting through the wheat fields, and the swish-swish-swish of the stalks and the sweet yellow smell of the buds and the swaying of the cart made it difficult to stay awake. Luckily (ha!) I had Cody for that.

  “I think this park will be the prettiest park that ever was. My uncle says nothing in the world compares to east Tennessee, and I believe him on that. He says he’s going to make everyone in the Cove really rich since he’s helping bring in the national park and y’all will be right on the park’s border and will be able to open hotels and restaurants and automobile gasoline stations for all the tourists.” Seeing no reaction from me, he asked, “Aren’t you excited about being rich?”

  I shrugged. If he only knew that I’d pay just about any sum to get to Knoxville and start really living.

  “So why’s your name Autumn?” he asked. “Your hair’s blond, not red.”

  “I fall a lot.” At this, Gramps snorted from his driver’s perch.

  “You born in the fall?”

  “No.”

  “Where’s your dad?”

  “Where’s your dad?”

  At that, he fell silent. Served him right, the nosy little booger. But after a while, I could tell he was sad. Real sad. I couldn’t tell if he was crying (I didn’t really look), but it wasn’t cold enough out there for those kind of sniffles.