One Shenandoah Winter (10 page)

Nathan squinted and looked back at the bottle. It seemed impossibly far away, a tiny shard glimmering jewel-like on the distant post. He glanced back at the old man. As far as Nathan could tell, the old man had not glanced once at the distant post.

“You want to hunt these hills, son, you got to learn more than just how to track.” Poppa Joe took a step towards the awe-struck boy, his walk as palsied as his hands. “You got to learn the mountain's ways. You got to have respect for God's creation, and learn the lessons He done wrote in the earth. You hear what I'm saying?”

“Yessir, Poppa Joe, I'm a'hearing.”

The sense of timelessness Nathan had been feeling ever since his arrival gathered and grew in force, focusing down upon the moment. Nathan felt caught in an amber of immortal power. He was able to sense everything, capture it in sensations he knew would take ages to digest.

“God is all around us. He walks these hills Himself, and you can walk with Him, if you only learn the way. You got to be quiet, not with your mouth, but quiet with your
mind
. You got to be reverent in these hills, 'cause they're God's home. He gave them to us for a time, but make no mistake, they're His and His alone.”

Everything seemed full of silent import. The way the tips of the grass breathed in unison, the slight chill spicing the afternoon sunlight, the way the young man and the boy hung on every word Poppa Joe spoke.

Poppa Joe looked down at the gun in his trembling hands. “We hunt and we eat what we take from God's bounty. But it ain't the hunting that's important. It's what we bring with us when we come, and take back with us when we leave. You remember that. God calls us to give our lives
meaning
. We do that by living with respect and love, for creation and for our neighbor. And whenever you're blessed with time up here, you treat these hills like you would a church. 'Cause God lives here. Make no mistake about that.”

Then it happened. One moment the hands were shaking and holding the gun down at his waist, almost in offering. The next moment and the shot had already rung out in the still air. Nathan had not even seen the rifle move.

He felt himself jump with the shock of how swift it had happened. Glass shattered in the distance like faint chimes.

The mountains applauded the feat, great booming echoes back and forth from hillside to hillside for an impossibly long time.

Poppa Joe lowered the rifle, opened the bolt, blew out the plume of smoke from the barrel.

“
Doggone!
” The boy cried and jumped and pulled at Duke's sleeve. “Did you
see
that, Uncle Duke? Did you
see
that?”

Poppa Joe waited until the boy's shining eyes had returned to his ancient features, then he said, “You remember what I told you, son. These hills is God's home. You be sure and give His gift a worthy meaning in your young life.”

Ten

B
y the time Connie came down the mountain, the Saturday afternoon was gradually giving way to a goldenhued evening. Connie spent the entire drive to Hattie's house mentally haranguing the doctor. And her uncle. Which even she had to admit was a little bizarre, since there were far more pressing problems awaiting her in Richmond. Not to mention the reason she was going by the Campbells' house this particular evening.

But her mind remained fixed on those men and their clannish gathering. She had felt utterly isolated, just some outsider good only to step and fetch.

What was far worse was how she had lost yet another argument with Nathan Reynolds. Connie gave an irritated shake to her head, forcing her hair back behind her shoulders. Well, it was the last time he'd ever have a chance to get the better of her. She would never go back to that clinic. Not even if she were bleeding from a dozen holes, she would not see him again. Nossir. Not even if her life depended on it.

She came over the rise and pulled into the Campbells' drive and turned off the engine. And she sat there. Because she realized then she had no idea what on earth she was going to say.

Like a lot of the older hillside homes, the Campbells had added on to what once had been a log-and-slat cabin. Theirs had been done with taste and concern, each subsequent generation adding modern features and a bit more room. The original cabin was now the living room, a jutting front section whose forward-facing wall now held a grand plate-glass window. The walk leading from the drive to the front door was paved with the same Hillsboro stone that supported the two brick arms stretching out from the cabin.

More stone formed the corner joists and chimney. The result was a house of character, one that drew stares and slowed cars. Connie had often stared herself, especially on evenings when the front curtains were flung back and she could see figures moving about inside. And she would wonder how it might have been, had she argued less and listened more, both to Chad Campbell and to her own heart.

Back when Connie was young, she had thought the whole world waited and beckoned from just beyond the reach of the next valley. After her parents had died in a pile-up with a logging truck, her love of Chad Campbell had been just about the only thing that had tied Connie to the town.

They had dated all through Connie's final two years of high school, and the closer she came to graduation, the more Chad had mentioned marriage. Connie had fought against it tooth and nail, frightened for reasons she only half understood. But the worst of their fights had not been about getting married. The truly cataclysmic battles had been over Chad Campbell's dream.

Since childhood Chad had dreamed of opening a grocery store in the heart of Hillsboro. Back when Chad was young, his family had suffered every winter after snows had closed the road and Hillsboro's only grocery had raised its prices. Even though Connie had known the reasons and agreed with them in principle, she still did not see how an intelligent man like Chad Campbell could hold to selling vegetables to cranky hillfolk as the dream of a lifetime.

They had spent at least part of every evening arguing over the future. Connie had been born with a restless spirit, turned raw and chafing by the events of her teenage years. Chad's quietly stubborn mountain ways had driven her straight up the wall.

Perhaps even then she had known that to have taken the man from his home would have killed him, for Chad's roots ran deep in the valley's hardscrabble soil. Perhaps if she had truly loved him enough she would have heard all the messages this quiet man had never put into words. It was one of those questions which continued to attack her in the weak moments of many sleepless nights.

Double page spread of Campbell's Grocery

Double page spread of Campbell's Grocery

She had finally made it out of Hillsboro, winning a scholarship to study business administration at the prestigious regional college, William and Mary. But the longer she had been away, the more Connie had pined for the hills and the tiny valley town which before had left her feeling as though she could not breathe.

But just as she was working up the nerve to write Chad and tell him he had been right all along, she had received a wedding invitation. Chad had decided to marry Hattie, Connie's oldest friend.

Hattie had always admired Connie and her spirit, yet had also realized that the valley was to be the place where she lived and died. Hillsboro remained the only home she ever wanted, needed, yearned for. Connie had attended the wedding and listened to all the folks say they had never seen such a perfect match. The words had scarred her heart like a branding iron.

The day after his marriage to Hattie, Chad had taken every cent he could save, beg, or borrow and bought the old livery stable at the far end of Main Street. Over the double glass doors, up above where the striped awning kept the summer sun off the racks of fresh produce, the finely etched wording for Smith's Livery and Horse Trading was still legible. That half-moon of wood was the only part of the entire place which had not been stripped down, repainted, polished, and spruced up until it was beyond all recognition.

A figure appeared in the Campbells' doorway, one whose golden hair formed a halo around her shadowy form. Dawn left the comfort of her house and started toward the car. Connie's heart ached at the sight of Dawn's hesitant step. Ever since she had been old enough to walk, Dawn's every hello for Connie had been enthusiastic, a sharing of the joy that welled up from within that bright-eyed little girl.

She was a child no longer. The young woman peered through the passenger door, studying Connie with an adult's gaze. Finally she opened the car door and slipped inside.

Dawn sat there a moment in silence, and then said, “You were taking so long, I decided to come on out and make it easier for you.”

Connie swallowed down the sudden welling of longing for all that had been, and all that had never been granted a becoming. Her arguments were dust in the wind, scattered and gone. The only thing she could manage was a shaky, “Don't do this, honey. Please.”

The Campbell home stood upon a knoll which had once been the high point of steeply sloping farmland. From her place behind the wheel, Connie could look out over both the house and the valley. Though the sun had descended behind the western ridges, streams of light turned the high reaches to shades of burnished bronze. The valley was lost to gathering shadows, while little star-flecks of light appeared to mark the way home.

When Dawn remained silent, Connie risked a glance over, and felt the breath catch around her heart. The girl's face was captured by the fading light of day, softened with timeless hues, filled with the wisdom of sadness. Her eyes remained steady on Connie, waiting for the older woman to face her full on.

Connie did so reluctantly. Everything about this new side to Dawn unsettled her. She could feel the child she had nurtured and loved slipping through her fingers like mercury, forcing her to confront a stranger. One who seemed to know more about Connie than she did herself.

Only when Connie had released her hold on the wheel and slid around on the seat did Dawn ask, “Why didn't you ever marry, Aunt Connie?”

There was another catch to the air, one that made it hard to answer. But the gathering night and the light in Dawn's eyes demanded honesty, even if it seared her insides to respond. “You know I once had a shine for your daddy.”

“Sure. Then you went away to college. After that you got hired by the county and came back home.”

“There was a boy then. It was the pastor's older brother.”

“Reverend Blackstone?” Surprise lilted her tone. “I didn't know he had a brother.”

“Julius Blackstone left town the year before you were born.” All these secrets reappearing. Things she had thought buried and forgotten. “He wanted me to come with him. But by then I'd finished my visiting in the outside world. I had gone out, seen all I wanted to, and known I was meant to live out my days in Hillsboro.”

“That's sad. But still it doesn't mean there couldn't have been somebody else.”

“The problem with growing old in a small town is, everybody has a past.”

“You're not old.”

“People tend to see you in light of what you've done. All your mistakes are out in the open.” Connie felt defeated by what she could not express. “I grew more involved in my work and let other things, like romance, fade away.”

The moment seemed to swell with the past, until it was almost natural for Dawn to give voice to the unspoken. “You still wish it was Daddy, don't you?”

Connie wondered at how the dimming light seemed to be captured by Dawn's eyes. “How did you learn about me and Chad?”

“Oh, I think I've always known. I remember how you used to look at him, and how Momma watched you two when you were in a room together.”

I never knew that,
Connie started to say, but the words did not seem to want to come out. So she sat there, held by the soft truth and by all that had never been.

“When I was still real young I asked Momma about it once. She said God had given us Aunt Connie so that if any- thing ever happened to her, there would be someone to take care of me and Daddy.”

I never knew that either,
Connie wanted to respond, but her throat had swollen shut.

“I thought it was the most natural thing in the world to have two mothers. I always had two daddies, God the Father and Pop. So why not two mothers? I never did understand how other children made it through life with just one of each.”

Dawn then did the most natural thing in the world, which was to slide over and give Connie a fierce hug. “I love you, Aunt Connie. I wish there was something I could do to give you the life you deserve.”

Connie felt captured by the words. The little girl she had helped raise was no longer there. Instead she watched as a woman slid back to the other door, gave her a lingering glance, and said with studied calm, “Duke Langdon and I are getting married. It would mean more than I could ever say if you would give us your blessing.”

Never,
Connie wanted to say. She felt her fingernails dig into the seat cover with the strain of trying to fight out the word. But she could not speak. Something clenched at her throat.

Dawn watched her face with the same sad wisdom she had brought with her to the car. She opened the door and stood, then leaned back over and said, “I love you with all my heart, Aunt Connie.”

She sat and watched this stranger who once had been her heart's delight walk away. She watched as Dawn entered the home which was not hers and never would be. And she felt a thousand years old.

Eleven

T
he evening was impossibly loud.

Nathan sat on Poppa Joe's front porch and watched crickets and lightning bugs fight for space in the still air. The temperature was more suited to September, comfortable even this late into evening. Little fluttering shapes suggested there were bats about, but they kept their distance and flew so fast Nathan could not be sure. Then there came a rending screech, like a foot-long nail being pried out of steel. Nathan demanded, “What on earth was that?”