Beloved Mother Read online

  LAURA HUNTER

  BELOVED MOTHER

  Copyright 2019 © Laura Hunter & Bluewater Publications

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Convention. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the Publisher.

  Bluewater Publications

  Bwpublications.com

  This work is based on the author’s personal perspective and imagination.

  Editor – Sierra Tabor

  Managing Editor – Angela Broyles

  Published by Bluewater Publications at Smashwords.

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-949711-09-7

  Print perfect bound book:

  ISBN: 978-1-934610-98-5

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957289

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  For my mother, Margaret Masters Barton,

  who taught me to love books and mountains

  and my husband, Tom,

  who taught me the value of love.

  Contents

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part II

  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

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part III

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  About the Author

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Take warning how you court young men – Mountain Ballad

  The Foot of Turtleback Mountain

  Legend had it that Mona Parsons could stir up dust devils by spinning a stick in the dirt. She called up a storm whenever farmers needed rain. She could twist a rain shower into a ferocious tree-breaker if the farmer denied her pay and call it back thrice-fold with a nod of her head. Word had it she came into the world dancing. The daughter of an established Parsons family in Covington, Virginia, born to a mother no more than eighteen and a daddy at least ten years older, she spent childhood evenings on the grass, stomping dew into the earth as if she tried to awaken Mother Nature herself.

  Each night, her father called to her from behind his unkempt beard to come inside. Not a deferring child, Mona glanced back at him, dashed through the gate and down the bank to Broken Rock Creek. Tiny, no larger than a wood sprite, she spent days on Turtleback Mountain gathering flowers and herbs and, some say, conjuring with wild beasts. Some days she came down the mountain, her hair filled with moss and sticks, looking like a disheveled elf, her lips and fingers blue from blackberries she had eaten off the sides of ditches.

  Had Mona then known of the communities of Cherokee Little People, she would have sung out to the Laurel People to share her joy on Turtleback Mountain. But she did not know. She would not know until Beloved Mother began Mona’s training.

  More forward-minded neighbors told her parents they were blessed. “Such an open, creative child,” they said.

  “Wild heathen,” others whispered. “A reed shaken by the wind,” some said. “Cursed.”

  The Parsons accepted the latter, deemed themselves steeped in hexes and bore no more children for four years. The Virginia mining town of Covington watched and waited. A family who owned an entire mountain could have access to mountain spirits, the old people intoned, and a child could breathe such spirits into her soul unknowing. Those who wield the obvious can manipulate the unseen. That’s the Lord’s own truth, they vowed.

  The summer Mona turned thirteen, an angular man sauntered into Covington as if he held the world in his back pocket. He carried a black valise and a hatchet swung from his belt. She first spied him at the base of the Lost Miners Monument in the Square. Without speaking, she followed him about day after day as if she had lost her power to the gleam in his eye. Folks later said he must have cast a spell on her.

  Her father belted her evenings when she came back home, but still she slipped out the window before dawn. Before any rooster could crow and when the river behind her house moved lazy and low, she was gone again, without thought of leaving her people behind.

  Early August, the man was seen leaving town at dusk. That night Mona’s bed lay empty. The town searched Covington for her. They scoured Turtleback Mountain for her. They went east to Spencer’s Mountain. They did not find her. They asked about for the man’s name, but no one could remember.

  Some within Covington said the shadowy stranger was Squire Dan Sparks from down ’round Cade’s Cove who had more land than anybody ever had.

  Some said he was Squire’s oldest boy who was untamed and a mite crazy.

  Some who knew not the Cherokee said he was meant to be a Cherokee medicine man but gave up and left for city ways.

  Great Spirit and Sister Sun and Brother Moon laugh so hard at such foolishness that Sister Sun forgets to leave the sky before Brother Moon appears in the east. Great Spirit has to send her on her way.

  Had the Cherokee been in the valley beneath this mountain, as they had been for generations prior, they would have explained that this Ama idnai, this Turtleback Mountain, was Great Spirit’s sacred place. He made it to specification before he ever thought of making a man.

  Here on Turtleback Mountain and in its shade stood hemlock and oak with fifty-foot canopies. Mountain oaks grew leaves so thick that little light could pass through. The soil beneath rested dark and dank. Thick laurel grew in so many colors Great Spirit had not named them all. Here streams rushed clear and cold year round, their waters filled with fishes, their banks alive with verdant mosses and ferns heavy with spore. Teeming marshes overran with cattails tall as young girls. Concealed here were fur-coated chipmunk, squirrel, fox and bear. Turtleback Mountain. Covington’s enduring and overarching guardian. Great Spirit’s personal garden.

  Cherokee would have told how the massive buzzard, who swooped down Turtleback with his mighty white-tipped wing, carved out the valley at the mountain’s solid foot. How Great Spirit was so pleased with the valley he decided here would be the place for his new creature: man. It was here on this mountain, in this valley, that Great Spirit placed Cherokee, the “real people,” molded from mud of Broken Rock Creek. It was here he took melted snow waters and filled the Cherokee with pure blood. Here, masquerading as the wind, he blew breat
h into the Cherokee, and they became one life.

  Most of Covington did not know the Cherokee way, so they in time labeled the lone wanderer “Beelzebub,” who had come to walk the mountains and steal young virgins.

  But the stranger was none of these. He was Jackson Slocomb, a vagrant from Pennsylvania who chanced upon Covington when he turned southeast off Turtleback Mountain ridge, rather than continuing west to Kentucky. He was Jackson Slocomb, a man who through years of practice could sway young girls to his favor. Here in Great Spirit’s valley he found Mona Parsons, of an age that had her primed to go.

  The year was 1923.

  Chapter 2

  West of Boone, Carolina

  Tall Corn found the camp on the edge of his farm, next to the spring where it broke from earth into sunshine. A thin strip of pale smoke told him someone was burning hardwood at the edge of his largest cornfield. Having an unwanted camp on his farm angered him. But to camp at this location caused his ire to grow with a fierceness he had not known, for he held this a sacred place where earth, water, and sun, three of the holy gifts of the Great Spirit, came together as one.

  Great Spirit watches the white man and the girl. It is their smoke that calls to mind Long Hunters and their camp, its puny smoke rising from their dying fire that drowsy morn, the year they cut their way west across his Turtleback Mountain. Perched on a rock ledge, fur-coated men crawled, humpbacked and beaver-like, one by one from lean-tos and stepped into brush to relieve themselves. They returned to squat before their meager fire and poke sticks into dying ash. Though a century and a half has passed, these two are not so different. It could have been yesterday.

  Finding the camp by its smoke column set no obstacles for Tall Corn. He knew his land as intimately as he knew the ridges of his farming hands. One with the land, he, like the hawk perched on the oak limb, vanished from the white man’s sight.

  This invader could only be a white man. Only a white man would dishonor the land of another by squatting in place rather than moving on. When Tall Corn came near the camp, he lowered himself to the ground and inched his way through thick underbrush. He crouched behind a stand of rhododendron once heavy with orange blossoms and watched.

  The camp was nothing more than a small fire, an oily tarpaulin hung on a rope between two pines and a cast-iron spider, its three pointed feet deep in the fire’s ash. The odor of rancid grease from having been left in the spider too long and from frying fish too many times overpowered the earth’s scent. A black valise had been tossed to the side. Neither man nor girl had swept straw and branches away to make a livable spot within the stand of pine. The skimpiness of supplies there in the month of the Harvest Moon, the white man’s October, told the Cherokee the two would freeze during the coming mountain nights before they would starve.

  A pale man in muddy black pants and canvas duster pulled back his coat to expose a hatchet hanging from his waist. He hunkered down before a small fire and poked at the flame as if the stirring would make the blaze bigger. Instead, he scattered wood and ash. The fire would not live. Tall Corn knew this.

  A white girl, no more than thirteen summers and heavy with child, crawled from under the tarpaulin. She held her back as she tried to stand. She wore workmen’s boots far too large for her small feet. Tall Corn listened.

  “Jackson,” she said, “I got to have help birthing this baby. I don’t know nothing. You don’t know nothing. I ain’t wanting to die just yet.” She attempted a laugh, but it hung itself in her throat. “I might not like how this baby come to be, but it’s alive in me and that matters.”

  The white man rose. His craggy face blackened where a heavy beard refused to be shaved close, its bone structure so exact it looked carved. Taut leathery skin made him more stone than flesh.

  Tall Corn smelled something more than woods and smoke in the air, something darker than the camp smoke now failing to rise. The odor of rot. The white man faced the girl. It was the man he smelled. The stench heightened with each movement the man made, intensified by what the girl called the man, rot rooted in the name “Jackson.” The white man’s name fueled Tall Corn’s resentment more. Only Uktena, the Great Serpent Himself, raised from beneath the waters, would sport such a name.

  Was it not a Jackson, Andrew Jackson, who had divided Tall Corn’s people and sent them walking to death through a winter snow? Across frozen rivers that collapsed under their weight? Was it not Jackson that spilled Cherokee blood over half the country, without firing a weapon, so the white man could not question? But question the whites did, through their many tears as the Cherokee walked past. Even white men recognized man’s blood can weigh so heavy that he breaks under the realization of death he carries as he walks. As they walked. And walked. As they lifted dropped bodies, no matter how heavy, no matter how far yet to go, and carried them to sanctified ground for burial. This was the legacy of Jackson. A name ever reviled in the Cherokee Nation.

  “Shut up, Mona. You ain’t dying yet.” Jackson spit tobacco juice into the dying fire. “Why I dragged you out of Virginia and into North Carolina, I’ll never know.” The man kicked at the fire with his boot. “Should have left you in Tennessee.”

  The girl tried to sit. Her unbalanced body knocked her back. She plopped against the ground and tugged at her thin cotton skirt crumpled under her hips. “Here. Pull me up,” she said and stuck out her hand.

  “Get up your own self.”

  She rolled to her side and lifted her bulk by bracing her hands against the ground, trying to hoist herself up. “I’m hungry. What we got to eat?”

  “You done et it all.” Jackson threw his poking stick into the underbrush.

  “What’re you doing? That stick’ll set these whole woods afire,” she said as she rose. “Go into them corn rows and get us a few and I’ll boil them up.” Bracing her back with her hand as if holding the baby in place, she started after the smoldering stick.

  “Do it yourself. I ain’t no thief.” He crawled under the tarpaulin.

  “No,” she sniffed and muttered to herself as she wiped dirt from her cheek. “But you’re damn good with a knife when you want to be.” Her fingers followed two scars down her cheek.

  She turned toward Tall Corn, staring, seeming to see nothing before her but what had been. If he moved, she would see him. A thin, white scar, like a tiny rip, ran down the girl’s left cheek. Just under that ran another, this one black, as if someone had filled it with soot before it closed. And so it had been.

  Tears ran down the scars and into the corner of her mouth. Tall Corn had never seen a person swallow her own sorrow. He would have to ask Beloved Mother about this. He thought it could not be a good thing. The sorrow would water its own root and grow stronger.

  The girl Mona and her hunger stirred a spirit Tall Corn had not known. He wanted her to have food. He wanted to gather corn for her, parch it in the oven he had built for his mother. He wanted to collect squash and beans for a feast. Bake sunflower seeds and boil a rabbit stew for her. He wanted to cover her bread with sweet honey and draw back a blanket so she could sleep away from damp ground. He offered none of these things. Instead, he watched her waddle into his cornfield and break off two ears of corn before he stole away.

  Tall Corn returned for three days. During each journey from his house to the edge of his cornfield, his spirit talked to him, reminded him that the girl was white, that the man rotted from within. If this child had been sired by the white man called Jackson, the child could be spawned by evil himself. Yet he continued to come observe the camp. Each day, he watched silent as a waiting fox as the white man growled and clomped about like a wounded bear. The more the man swore, the more the girl cowered.

  On this third day, he first smelled her fear. It was the fear he felt when his father took him one night deep into the forest as a child, blindfolded him and left him sitting on a stump. Fear of being abandoned. Fear of unrecognizable noises. It was fear that brought sorrow to his eyes and questions to his heart about why his father would l
eave him alone in the dark. He had known this fear. It sat thick and heavy within and left him trembling, not from cold, but from the anguish of loss.

  He recalled, also, the joy of removing the blindfold as he felt the sun on his arms when it began to warm the night chill. He knew the elation of finding his father sitting silent beside the stump, as he had done throughout the night.

  Tall Corn’s spirit assured him he could become the father he lost to a spring storm’s sharp lightning strike. He could ease the white girl’s uncertainties, as truly as he eased his animals during birthing. He could teach the child the Cherokee way. Each day he returned. Each day she seemed more fawnlike, a skittish innocent waiting assurance that she was safe.

  Beloved Mother sat by a curtain-less window and smoked a rolled cigarette. She spilled out of her chair like a mound of dough left to rise in a bowl too small. Dressed in yards of orange skirt and a puffy white blouse, few of her features, except her creased, sun-scorched face and worn hands, showed. Her thick hair hung in a plait down her back. Gazing out the window to staggered mountaintop waves, each a fainter blue than the one before, Beloved Mother listened to her son.

  Tall Corn came to Beloved Mother on the fifth day. He told her of the stench of the white man called Jackson. He told her of the weight of the child and the sorrow the girl carried. He asked for permission to offer the girl the polished shell so she could send the white man back to his people.

  He had grown tall, tall as the corn itself. He honored his Cherokee name, traditions of the people and the land. He was truly of the land. She did not want him to dishonor himself by approaching the white man called Jackson. She did not want him to weaken his Cherokee blood by lying with this girl. The tribe’s source of wisdom, she readily advised others, but this was her only son, her husband’s offshoot. He was all that was left of her life as a Cherokee wife, the root that afforded her trunk its stability. She was not sure she could live with a white woman in her house.