Mossy Creek.

A collective novel by Deborah Smith.

Sandra Chastain, Debra Dixon.

Virginia Ellis, Nancy Knight.

and Donna Ball.

Acknowledgements.

The authors of the Mossy Creek collection gratefully acknowledge all those whose patience and expertise have played such an integral role in bringing these stories to life: Laura Austin and Jack Berrywho believed you had to feed a child's imagination as well as her stomach.

Shannon Harper and Libby Hedrick, who know a good story when they hear one.

Pepper Chastain, who would have lived in Mossy Creek in a heartbeat.

Karen, Kim and Lynn, the original softball players who inspired the story of Casey, and Whitney Huffman, who begins a new generation of courageous young athletes.

Greg Hicks, dart-master and Irishmansteady and ever-ready to help.

Hank Smith, who knows his coffee beans, and Dora Brown, who would be happy drinking whiskey and cleaning guns with Miss Ida.

Bob, who cheers me on, and for Mike, Karol, Kristi, and Michael, who believe, and for Mother, who keeps on being the best.

Maureen Hardegree, Bill Dixon, and Rena Brown, who made sure everything made sense.

Stories.

Ida Shoots the Sign.

A Day in the Life.

The Prodigal Son.

Casey at the Bat.

The Naked Bean.

The Bereavement Report.

The Hope Chest.

Your Cheatin' Dart.

The Ugly Tree.

And a Prosperous New Year.

Mossy Creek Map.

The Mossy Creek Gazette.

215 Main Street * Mossy Creek, Georgia.

From the desk of Katie Bell, Business Manager.

Lady Victoria Salter Stanhope.

Cornwall, England.

Dear Lady Victoria, Let me introduce myself...I'm Katie Bell, gossip columnist for the Gazette and the unofficial town historian. That would mean that you've come to the right person for stories about the hometown of your recently discovered American ancestor! I'm happy to share what I know and to find out what I can.

Right now I can give you a few sketchy details. Your Great-Great-Great-Great Grandmother Isabella Salter began the 1859 feud between Mossy Creek and Bigelow, our neighboring town, when she ran away to England with Richard Stanhope. Apparently she jilted a Bigelow in the process.

But like any good gossip columnist, I want to check my facts before I say any more about their love affair or exactly who broke promises to whom.

I can definitely tell you that the feud isn't over. In fact, the feud is what's keeping me from getting more details right now. I need to talk to our Mayor Ida Hamilton Walker, but-as you can see from the story I've sent along-she's been busy this spring. If you knew Ida Walker, you'd know a lot about the kind of woman your ancestor probably was. And about the people in Mossy Creek today.

I look forward to sending you more news when I have it.

Your new friend and very distant relative to you on my mama's side, Katie Bell.

Ida.

Ida Shoots The Sign.

I was six years old, the year was 1950, and the torch of stubborn Mossy Creek pride was about to pa.s.s to me in true Mossy Creek style. I clutched the railing on a rickety wooden scaffold the Hamilton farmhands had hung fifty feet up the side of the whitewashed Hamilton Farm corn silo. My grandmother and namesake, Ida Hamilton, stood precariously on a level of scaffolding above me, wildly waving a small brush dipped in black paint. Big Miss Ida, as people called her, was six feet tall, thick-limbed and as strong as a mountain lumberman. Yet she wore her silver hair in a snazzy French twist and her trademark pearl necklace always showed above the collar of her practical chintz work dress. I was known as Little Miss Ida. I trembled in my overalls and Davy Crockett c.o.o.nskin cap as I gazed up at Grandma's stocky legs and chintz-covered behind, directly above my head. If Grandma made one wrong move, I'd be known as Little Miss Squashed Ida.

"Pray like a saint and paint like a heathen!" Grandma sang out, slinging specks of black paint everywhere. Oily dabs speckled my upturned face. I refused to duck. I had to be brave. This had to be crazy. But in Mossy Creek, courage was a given, and crazy was a virtue. Helping Grandma re-paint the aged Mossy Creek welcome sign on the big corn silo was as solemn as a prayer in church, only without hard patent-leather shoes. The silo stood in a sanctuary framed by broad cattle pastures, high, wooded ridges, and blue-green Southern mountains. I stared up at Grandma's painting project-the tall, faded words of the town slogan.

WELCOME TO MOSSY CREEK.

THE TOWN YOU CAN COUNT ON.

AIN'T GOIN' NOWHERE, AND DON'T WANT TO Those words had greeted town visitors for generations. The silo faced South Bigelow Road, the country two-lane that led the world to our mountain doorstep with the promise of great charm but also stubborn independence, metropolitan Mossy Creek. You could count on Mossy Creek to stay put, to always be the hometown you remembered, the place you would never forget and never wanted to. We might make only a pinpoint on maps of the world, but that pinpoint was a jewel. And so I, Little Miss Ida The Terrified, vowed to survive and uphold the town motto.

A gust of wind hit the scaffolding. I hung on for dear life. Mossy Creek might not be moving, but me, Grandma, and the scaffolding were headed out on a north wind. "Come on up, Little Miss Ida, the weather's fine!" Grandma bellowed, swashbuckling in her defiance of gravity, Pica.s.so-sequel in her ability to slap abstract dabs of black house paint precisely inside the fading borders of huge words that had been stenciled on the silo's side by a Hamilton ancestor long before either Grandma or I were born.

"Do you think I'll bounce if I fall off?" I asked, eyeing a narrow wooden ladder that led from my level to hers.

"You're a Hamilton! You won't bounce, you won't bend, you won't break! Now clamber on up here. She who hesitates is last." The wind puffed Grandma's dress, and I saw straight up her flowered skirt. My grandmother, a pillar of the community, a rich woman who commanded 200 acres of prime cattle farm and owned half the countryside in and around Mossy Creek, wore lacy pink panties. I began to giggle, and the scaffold shook harder.

I pulled my c.o.o.nskin cap down hard on my auburn Hamilton hair and prayed the way my mother taught me in church, where I was expected to set an example for lesser humans. Have no fear. Lead and defend. Hamiltons, like most Mossy Creekites, had a pa.s.sion for honorable eccentricity and practical self-defense.

Have no fear. Lead and defend.

I climbed the ladder to Grandma's scaffold then held onto her outstretched hand like a squirrel wrapped around a telephone pole. She grinned at me. "See? It's all about shouting down the wild wind!"

Suddenly I felt as tall as the softly molded green mountains around us. I threw back my head. "I hope to shout!"

"Yaaah hooo!"

"Yaaah hooo!"

Grandma placed her small paintbrush in my hands. She gestured at the welcome slogan. "I'm afraid I'll mess it up," I admitted in a whisper.

"Bullfeathers. All it takes is a steady hand and a respect for tradition."

"Ardaleen says the saying's backward and stubborn. She says people down in Bigelow think we're all a bunch of pee-culiar small town mountain hicks." Ardaleen was my much-older sister, already sixteen and extremely annoying.

Grandmother snorted. "Your sister's struck with the prissy stick. Firstborns are always a stickler for rules. She liked her diapers too tight from day one. That's why I took a hard look at her in the crib and said, 'Nope, name the next one after me.'"

I beamed at her. "Because you knew I wouldn't be struck with the prissy stick."

"I know I can depend on you to knock sense into your sister's head if she ever sets her sights against her own hometown. And knock sense into anybody else who wants to throw out the baby with the bath water, tradition-wise." She nodded at the slogan. "You've got to keep the words up here and their meaning in your heart."

I put one paint-speckled hand over my heart. "I swear I'll knock and keep."

"Good girl. Now, paint." Grandma helped me guide the brush. Ain't Going Nowhere and Don't Want To. I put a big dab of black paint on the "I" in AIN'T. "So I will always stand out," I said.

Grandma laughed. "See? You've got the knack. You'll be the Big Miss Ida around here some day, and I'll be proud of you in Heaven."

"How will I know you're watching?"

She winked at me and pointed at her behind. "Whenever you see pink clouds in the sky, that'll be me showing off."

I laughed and suddenly understood my place in the world. I, Ida Hamilton The Knocker and Keeper, would shout down the wind, hold onto our best old ways but welcome new ones, and when in doubt look up to heaven for a glimpse of Grandma's pink drawers.

In Mossy Creek, that brand of philosophy makes perfect sense.

Fifty years pa.s.sed as quickly as a dream. I woke up on a cool spring morning and lay quietly in my big bed at Hamilton Farm, gently remembering that day with Grandma at the corn silo. I was the Big Miss Ida, now. I put a Best of Fleetwood Mac CD in the sound system of my parlor office, turned up the volume on "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow," drank a swig of scotch straight from the bottle, unlocked my mahogany gun cabinet, and loaded sh.e.l.ls into my heirloom twelve-gauge shotgun with the silver-inlaid Hamilton crest.

After my parents disinherited Ardaleen for marrying a Bigelow, I inherited a lion's share of the Hamilton property and buildings, both in town and at Hamilton Farm. Ardaleen lives on a fake English estate down in Bigelow and hasn't spoken to me in twenty years. I'm the mayor, not to mention being the town's biggest property owner and landlord. And, if I do say so myself, I'm a fine-looking woman. I allow a few gray tendrils around the front of my hair now, but I consider them racing stripes.

I dressed in tailored khakis, a silk blouse and a dark blazer. I put my hair up with a tortoisesh.e.l.l clip and polished my wedding ring. I've been a widow for longer than I care to remember, and though I've had my share of menfriends, I still wear my husband's etched gold wedding band. Over my parlor desk, I have a little bronze plaque he gave me: Tradition. Courage. Love. Finally, I latched a single strand of heirloom pearls around my neck. Grandma's pearls.

It was time to knock heads.

The mountains had begun greening like a dime store shillelagh. We were smack in the Ides of March. I walked down the long gravel farm road, through the woods and pastures, carrying the shotgun like a baby. Caesar will get his due, I vowed grimly.

Fifty of my fat, tan-and-white Guernsey cows followed me along a pasture fence as if I was the Pied Piper of moo-dom. Beyond the farm's big front pastures, South Bigelow Road still snaked past Hamilton Farm on its way into town, and the old corn silo still stood proudly, bearing the Mossy Creek welcome sign. A big, ugly, neon-yellow state highway truck squatted across from it, on the far side of South Bigelow.

I reached the road, and several workmen looked up from their project. When they saw the shotgun, they backed away, their eyes going wide. They reached into their yellow coveralls, pulled out cell phones, and began calling for backup. I lifted the shotgun. "Just stand back, boys. This is between me and my sister Ardaleen's son."

I looked up at the old silo. Thanks to my fresh coat of paint, its tall black words still stood out against the white sides as if stamped there by a huge hand. Ain't Going Nowhere, And Don't Want To. I nodded to that sentiment then faced the road crew's handiwork, an antiseptically modern, green-metallic sign with reflective white lettering: Mossy Creek, Georgia The Town That IS Going Somewhere, And DOES Want To.

By Order of Hamilton Bigelow, Governor of Georgia I blasted that sign. I shot it again, then reloaded and shot it two more times. By the time I finished, the sign leaned backwards like a drunk in a windstorm. The last blast punched a hole the size of a fist through the metal. There were only a few readable pieces of words left, to my satisfaction.

Ham to Go.

I turned my attention to the blue March sky. A wisp of pink morning clouds showed over the mountains. Grandma's panties.

She was watching, and she was proud. "I hope to shout," I yelled.

And Ham's road crew ran.

Police officer Mutt Bottoms shuffled his feet and bit his lip as if he wished he could drop into a long, dark hole and forget he had a duty to perform. Behind him, in the yard of my big Victorian farmhouse, a Mossy Creek munic.i.p.al patrol car waited. Mutt was young and he was dedicated, but he looked as if he feared I'd grab him on one ear, the way I had when he was ten years old and I caught him in town hiding stink bombs under the breakfast porch of the Hamilton House Inn. Mutt had already sent five of the inn's guests inside complaining about dead skunks.

All these years later, he put a hand over one ear. "Miss Ida, I feel like you got me again."

"It's all right, Officer Bottoms. I'm not upset."

He cleared his throat so hard his Adam's apple bobbed like a fishing cork. "Okay. Then, uh, Mayor, you're under arrest for shooting the new welcome sign." He sagged a little. "Amos said I had to come get you. It wasn't my idea."

"It's all right." I smiled. Mossy Creek Chief of Police Amos Royden did not disappoint me. Amos played fair and square, and mayor or not, I was going to jail. Perfect. I picked up the paisley overnight bag I'd packed with a little make-up, a mirror, my laptop computer, and a press release I'd already written. "See you later, June," I called to my curly-haired Scottish housekeeper.

"Be good, Madam Ida," she chimed back and stepped out into the hall from the kitchen, waving. June McEvers grinned like a large, blonde, Scottish Shirley Temple. "Or at least look good."

I nodded and smiled as I faced poor Mutt, who gulped. "Aren't you going to handcuff me?" I asked.

He backed down my veranda steps as if I'd grown extra heads. "I'd rather be skinned alive."