Ghost on Black Mountain (31 page)

“It’s not my dad you have to watch. My mother is the person who will pick you apart.”

Did I hear him dragging his feet as we walked into the house?

Mama appeared like an apparition from nowhere. “Well, is this your friend?” She looked at me with a sly expression. “You’re everything Iona said.” She held out her hand.

Anthony took it. “I’m so glad to finally meet you, ma’am.”

“You know Iona is our pride and joy.” Mama looked at me.
“And how did you two meet again?” The question hung around the three of us.

“My mother is a nurse at the home where Iona’s grandmother stays.” Anthony looked directly into Mama’s eyes.

“And here I was thinking Iona was wasting her summer away. It’s nice to know she was entertained.” Mama ran her fingers through her short blond curls. “What’s your last name, Anthony?”

“Taylor, ma’am.”

She nodded. “Now we can proceed.”

“He brought wine for supper.” I held out the bottle.

Mama’s eyes literally twinkled. “What would the congregation say?” A giggle escaped her. She took the bottle. “Your father can pretend it’s communion wine.” She winked.

“Would you like some help in the kitchen?” Anthony offered.

Mama shot a look at him. “Are you kidding? Can you cut vegetables?”

“Yes ma’am. I’m good in the kitchen. Mama taught me to fend for myself.”

“Oh young man, I do believe you are winning me over.” She turned a dazzling smile on me. “Take him to walk on the marsh. Dinner will be ready soon.”

And that’s how Mama fell head over heels in love with Anthony.

We walked hand in hand. “I don’t think I can stand you to go back to school, Iona. What if you forget me?”

“I have to go back. Music is my life.”

“I know.” He smiled.

The wind blew as the tide moved into the marsh grass. An egret stood not far from us. “I’ll be back for the holidays.”

“You’ll find someone else up there in North Carolina.”

“No one like you.” I touched his cheek. “Come on.” I pulled him along.

“Where are we going?”

“It’s a surprise.”

When we stood in front of Daddy’s church, Anthony looked at me. “So you’re going to marry me. That’s it.”

I pushed at him. “You silly. No.”

“Tell my broken heart why you brought me here.”

I pulled him into the church. “Have a seat.”

He sat down in the front pew while I sat at the piano. The music flowed through me as I thought of us making love. In that moment, I could have married him and tossed school out the window. We were complete. Maybe in the long run that would have been best. But he listened. I played.

The next morning Mama smiled as I came into the kitchen. She was taking me to the bus station. Daddy had some kind of church meeting.

“He’s a good boy,” she sang from the stove. Her apron was a spotless white.

“Well, did you think he wouldn’t be? Jees, Mama.”

“Do you want to stop and tell Maw Maw bye before I drop you?”

“Sure.”

Maw Maw sat in a chair near the window. I placed my hand on her shoulder. “I have to go back to school.”

She looked at me.

“I’m going to check with the nurse about her medicine. I’ll be right back.” Mama’s heels clicked down the quiet hall.

“I told you not to marry that boy, Nellie.” Maw Maw looked at me.

“It’s me, Iona, Maw Maw.”

“He was bad. I knew he was bad. That Hobbs was the meanest man to ever come off Black Mountain.”

The old ghost story had entered her mind and she thought it was real. Poor thing. “That’s just a silly story. Remember Mama told me that one all the time.”

She grabbed my wrist. “He tried to kill her. Do you understand? She didn’t have a choice for what she did. Do you understand me?” Her eyes were wild and crazy.

She wasn’t there with me but in the story. “Settle down, Maw Maw. It’s me, Iona.”

“He beat her so bad. I told Nellie that he would do something bad, but she wouldn’t listen to me. Stay away from Hobbs Pritchard. You understand?”

“Yes ma’am. I understand.”

Her grip relaxed. “You were always my good girl, Iona. Your mama worked hard not to let you get hurt like she did.”

“How did she get hurt?” I swallowed hard.

“Well, you know already. She’s been telling you the story for years.”

“Mama, Iona is leaving for school today. She’s come to say good-bye.” Mama stood in the door.

Maw Maw looked at her hands as if she were a bad child.

The crazy thing was I got the feeling I now knew something about Mama’s secret. But I couldn’t. A crazy ghost story told to a child to keep her thoughts in the right direction. Come on. My feeling didn’t make sense.

Mama kissed and hugged me at the bus station. The overhead fans spun slowly, clicking away the minutes I had left.

“She’s getting worse, Iona. Don’t let it upset you. You go learn your music.”

“Yes ma’am,” I answered like a small child.

Fifty-three

T
he first time I saw Lonnie, he wore this sultry smile that wiped Anthony from my mind. He sat on the handrail outside the math building and the current he generated reached out and grabbed me. Like so many boys of the time, he wore his hair in an Everly Brothers–style haircut. But something was different about this boy. Maybe it was the fact he wore no socks with some old leather sandals. Or maybe it was the way he raised his eyebrow slightly when he caught me looking.

I rushed through the big double doors, my cheeks burning. The heat off his beautiful cornflower-blue eyes burnt holes in my back. It was quite possible I would have forgotten him had I never seen him again, but later that evening, when I went to the music room to practice, my life opened like a rare rose in late fall.

I was lost in my music; I became aware of a new presence slowly, like a fog, a mountain fog, denser than normal, drifting in from the west. Lonnie sat in one of the chairs. It would be many years before I realized he played me like the fine-tuned guitar he always wore on his back. When I looked into his eyes,
I stopped playing and went to stand in front of him. Magic unfolded. I never gave it a second thought when I followed him to his car. This was a few years before the age of love, peace, and drugs, but I found all three in him. He took me on long hikes into the mountains, where I itched to capture nature in my music.

We made love on a blanket spread over a large flat rock that jutted over a fast-moving creek. The hard surface was alive with the warmth of the sun. Lonnie told me the Cherokees believed rocks could guide a person in the right direction. Anthony slid fluidly from my life.

Lonnie could always be found driving his convertible with the top down. He taught me to smoke something he called marijuana from a cigarette he rolled. This involved inhaling the smoke deep into my chest and holding it for as long as I could. Lonnie was a free spirit, a composer of music, lyrics that wove long intricate stories into haunting melodies. He was way ahead of his time. I had fallen in love.

On one of our drives into the mountains, I asked him where he grew up, thinking it would be someplace like New York City or L.A.

“A hick town.” He smiled at me. “I want you to write the music for some of my new lyrics.”

I ran my fingers through his hair. “A hick town.”

“Where did you come from?”

“The coast of Georgia.”

“Damn, I didn’t even think Georgia had a coast,” he hooted.

“It does and I grew up there. It is one of the most beautiful places in the world.”

Lonnie looked over at me. “I wish I could like where my home is. I mean, I’m famous there and all. My real dad was murdered.”

“That’s horrible.”

“Someone cut off his head.”

I choked on the smoke I pulled into my lungs.

“Really. I mean it.”

Laughter was building in my mind.

“I found his skull in the old hollow tree out by our house. I was just a little boy, but I knew.”

I noticed the car was drifting onto the shoulder of the road.

He grinned. “We’re too out of it to talk bout this now. But it’s something I think about every day.”

“I’m sorry.”

He shrugged and righted the car. “I’m going home. The whole town has a big party at our house the Saturday before Halloween. It’s kind of a tradition with my mom and dad. You want to come and meet my family?”

“Sure.” We had crossed some invisible line.

“It’s all too crazy,” he hooted.

The weekend came and I didn’t bother to tell Mama and Daddy about my plan to go with Lonnie. Mama’s letters always mentioned Anthony, and I couldn’t stand the thought of answering her list of questions.

Lonnie and I set out early Saturday morning. Lonnie grabbed his guitar and threw it in the back of his car. He smelled of whiskey.

“Now remember, moms will be moms, but mine is a piece of work. She’s crazy overprotective. My dad’s a little easier.”

“I thought you said—”

“My stepdad.”

I got into the passenger side.

“You want to smoke? You’ll want to be high before you meet my parents.”

I shook my head. “I’m not going to smoke for a while. It’s messing with my music.”

He threw his head back and laughed. “You’re so damn dedicated. The folks will love you. Dad will be looking for me to give you a ring or something. Maybe even our ghost will appear for you. We have the most famous ghost story in North Carolina.”

I ignored how fast he was taking the curves. “I know a pretty good story too.”

“Ours is the best. See, ours is about my daddy’s death and his wife, who more than likely killed him before she killed herself.”

I got a chill. “Your mother is alive.”

“Yeah.” He looked over at me, taking another curve fast.

“Do you want me to drive?”

“I’m fine.”

“So who is the woman your father was married to? You got me all turned around.”

He grinned. “My mama never married my daddy. She married his stepbrother. How’s that for family history?”

“Wow.”

“People wonder why I have problems.” He sounded angry. “They all say I’m turning out to be just like my real father, the great almighty Hobbs Pritchard. He’s the villain of Black Mountain, the man who drove Nellie Pritchard to murder and then to throw herself off the mountain.”

I thought of Maw Maw’s fingers gripped around my wrist. How could my story be mixed up with Lonnie’s father?

“You’re awful quiet.”

A chill walked right through my hair.

Fifty-four

L
onnie’s mother was friendly enough. Her dark hair curled around her face in the universal mom hairdo of the sixties. But she had the most beautiful eyes. The view in front of the simple house stopped me in my tracks. Layers and layers of mountains as far as I could see reminded me of waves in the ocean. All I needed was the smell of salt and I’d be home.

“Pretty, huh?” Lonnie whispered. He hugged his mother. “This is Iona Harbor. She comes from the coast of Georgia. Her music is beautiful.” He pulled me close. “I told her we have ghosts lurking around.”

Mrs. Allen smiled and slapped him with a dish towel. “Lonnie, don’t scare her away.” She looked at me. “Don’t you listen to him. He’s the only person around this house who ever saw a ghost.”

As we walked into the front room, my vision blurred, but the feeling was gone in an instant. A fire burned in the fireplace, and I had a hard time taking my stare away from the flames. I held out my hand. “It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Allen, and he didn’t scare me.”

“It’s a pleasure, honey.” She winked her approval at Lonnie and took my hand. “You found one with manners. Your dad is down at Aunt Ida’s old house. We finally rented it out.”

“Why don’t he just sell the place?” Lonnie leaned his guitar case against a chair.

“We thought you might want to live there when you finish school.”

“No way. I’ve told you guys over and over I’m not coming back to this mountain to live.”

“Well, you never know, Lonnie. People do change their minds.”

A truck pulled into the drive. A tall man with graying hair emerged. He smiled when he saw Lonnie’s convertible.