Crossing Tinker's Knob Read online

  Crossing Tinker's Knob

  Inglath Cooper

  Fence Free Entertainment, LLC

  Crossing Tinker's Knob Copyright © 2014 by Inglath Cooper.

  Contents

  Copyright

  Books by Inglath Cooper

  A Note From the Author

  Prologue

  1. Fix Sunday

  2. Departures and Arrivals

  3. Collapsed Bridges

  4. Links

  5. Butterfly Wings

  6. Impending Storms

  7. A Secret Room

  8. Frogs and Sunrises

  9. Truths

  10. Echoes

  11. Deliveries

  12. Tapestries

  13. Connections

  14. Wishes

  15. Mending and Judging

  16. Maybes

  17. Hope and Boxes

  18. Beans and Boys

  19. Questions

  20. This Kiss

  21. A Boy's Life

  22. Destinations

  23. The Other Parts

  24. One Simple Truth

  25. Smudged Lines

  26. First Cry

  27. Paw Paw Trees and Whippings

  28. Legends Get Dumped, Too

  29. A Single Seed

  30. Unexpected Encounter

  31. Cherry Picking

  32. Connection

  33. Real Love

  34. A Clean Heart

  35. Even When

  36. Searching

  37. Drowning

  38. Clear Signs

  39. Sacrifice

  40. Too Far Gone

  41. Promises

  42. Questions

  43. Understanding

  44. There Comes a Day

  45. The Light

  46. Embers

  47. Middle Ground

  48. Enough

  49. A Place to Hide

  50. Free

  51. A Dream

  52. A Keening

  53. A Letter

  54. Awake

  55. Son

  56. Sorrowful News

  57. Threads

  58. Questions

  59. Truth

  60. To Go Along

  61. Evidence

  62. Good-byes

  63. Ascent

  64. A Sign

  Letter from Abby

  Reading Group Guide

  Thank You!

  Get a FREE copy of Good Guys Love Dogs!

  Bonus 15 Chapters of Jane Austen Girl

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  An Excerpt from Nashville - Part One - Ready to Reach

  Get in Touch With Inglath Cooper

  Free Stuff!

  Copyright

  Published by Fence Free Entertainment, LLC

  Copyright © Inglath Cooper, 2014

  Cooper, Inglath

  Crossing Tinker’s Knob/ Inglath Cooper

  ISBN - 978-0-9914997-2-4

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher at the email address below.

  Fence Free Entertainment, LLC

  [email protected]

  Publisher’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  ______________________________

  People say you can’t ever go back. That some of the things that happen to us simply cannot be redone. But the paths of a life journey are rarely straight. They twist and turn and wind back across those once visited and long thought to have faded from existence.

  Becca Miller has lived her life trying to do the right thing, even when its cost has been giving up the boy she loved and wanted to marry. The sacrifice she made for her sister isn’t one she regrets because there was no other choice for her to make. And for eighteen years, she lives this choice with full commitment and as little looking back as she can manage.

  But when Matt Griffith returns to Ballard County for the funeral of his grandmother, the path that had seemed so straight begins to loop back and take her across feelings she thought she had put away for good. As it turns out, those roads we’ve traveled do not fade at all. They simply wait to be retraveled, leaving us with the decision to follow them exactly as we did before, or make a different choice and find out where it will lead us.

  Books by Inglath Cooper

  Rock Her

  Crossing Tinker’s Knob

  Jane Austen Girl

  Nashville – Part Five – Amazed

  Nashville: Part Four – Pleasure in the Rain

  Nashville: Part Three – What We Feel

  Nashville: Part Two Hammer and a Song

  Nashville: Part One – Ready to Reach

  Good Guys Love Dogs

  Truths and Roses

  A Gift of Grace

  RITA® Award Winner John Riley’s Girl

  A Woman With Secrets

  Unfinished Business

  A Woman Like Annie

  The Lost Daughter of Pigeon Hollow

  A Year and a Day

  On Angel’s Wings

  A Note From the Author

  Dear Readers,

  This story is set in a fictionalized version of Franklin County, the county where I grew up in southwest Virginia. Some of the early settlers to the county were members of the Old Order German Baptist Brethren, who for generations, have made a life of simplicity a priority.

  Brethren homes and farms are scattered throughout the county, but members of the Old Order church are easily distinguished from other citizens by their clothing, a symbol of their faith. Women wear the traditional plain dress with a cape attached at the shoulders. Their long hair is secured in a bun and covered by a white or black bonnet. Men often have long beards. Some live among other members of the community without making use of modern conveniences such as television, radio and computer. Others have moved away from some of these more strict practices.

  Like the county that inspired it, my fictional town of Ballard represents an interlocking blend of farms and industry, Super retailers and Main Street renewal. It is a place caught in a visible struggle between past and present.

  Maybe this is a universal struggle, one that doesn’t limit itself to a place, but applies to the lives of its people as well. The present, after all, cannot exist without its past. The two are inextricably tied, a circle that must eventually find its point of completion. For my characters here, raised in a county of like and different, the ends of the circle are about to connect, the ensuing collision forever altering the journey of those on its path.

  Prologue

  What is deservedly suffered must be borne with

  calmness, but when the pain is unmerited,

  the grief is resistless.

  - Ovid
<
br />   Then

  There’s a moon tonight. It hangs in the sky above the barn, fat and full, a summer moon. It lights my path across the backyard, the parched grass beneath my feet making a brittle, crackling sound. Daddy says if we don’t get some rain soon, the corn crop won’t be worth cutting.

  At the thought of him asleep in his bed, worn out from a day spent putting away over a thousand bales of hay, I feel a sharp pang of guilt for sneaking out of the house. I don’t like hiding things from Mama and Daddy. But it’s not as if they won’t know the truth soon enough.

  Three weeks from today when I turn sixteen, John and I are getting married. I know we’re young, but I’m just glad I found someone who wants the same life I want. Mama says when people are different and don’t believe the same things, it’s not likely that a life together would ever work. My brother Jacob and my sister Becca are both choosing a different path, and I worry that what Mama said will come true for them.

  I’ve always loved our life. Unlike some of the girls I know from church, I never once wanted to be like the other people we saw in town on Saturday trips to the grocery store. Never wished for things we didn’t have. I like the idea of being the same at the end of my life as I was at the beginning.

  I tighten the strings of my white bonnet and pick up my pace, nearly running when I reach the big sliding doors at the front of the hay barn. I pull one side back, slip through, leaving it slightly cracked for light.

  John is waiting inside for me. He smiles his lopsided smile and reaches for my hand. “Hey, Emmy.”

  “Hey,” I say, and something inside me melts a little at the sound of his voice on my name. I guess at my age it’s hard to know what real love is, but I suspect what I feel for him is close enough. He makes me laugh, and seeing him fills me up with the kind of warm feelings I used to get when Grandma Austin would make me hot chocolate on snowy days.

  He pushes a bale of hay against the wall for us to sit on, knocking to the floor the old metal pitchfork Daddy uses to dole out flakes of hay to the dairy cows. Once when I was a little girl, Becca left this exact pitchfork lying outside by the water troughs one morning when she was helping Daddy feed. I didn’t see it and stepped on it. One of the sharp tines stuck through the ball of my foot, and Mama had to take me to the emergency room to get a tetanus shot. As a punishment, Becca had to do my milking chores for two weeks.

  I start now to pick the fork up and prop it back in the corner, but John takes my hand and pulls me down next to him, and I forget about it.

  We talk for a bit, sharing little pieces of our day and thoughts we’ve had about our wedding. He puts his hand on mine and looks at me with a sweet pride. “I’m going to talk to my dad about us living in the little house on our farm,” he says.

  I lean back and look at him, both surprised and pleased. “You think it’ll be okay?”

  “Once they get used to the idea, they’ll be glad to have us so close.”

  I feel a wash of relief at this, just knowing that’s one thing we won’t have to pay for. John and I both realize we’ll have a hard time making ends meet at first.

  We sit, quiet, his hand still resting on mine. After a while, he leans over and kisses me, and I think how it’s nice to feel love in another person’s touch. That out of all the things I want from life, this would top the list.

  We kiss for a few minutes under the unspoken agreement that until we’re married, things won’t go any further again. I rub my thumb across the freckles on his cheek and then loop my fingers through his wavy red hair.

  “Maaatt! Becccca!”

  The voice booms out of nowhere, the names slurred at the edges. John and I both sit up with a start.

  “Who is it?” John asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say, straightening my dress and standing.

  The door opens, and three shadows fall across the darkened dirt floor of the old hay barn.

  “Matt! Becca!” the bigger boy calls out again. “You two in here going at it? Sayin’ your good-byes? You know he’s gonna forget all about you, Beeecca, once he’s at U-V-A with all those hot, smart chicks.”

  “They’re not here,” John says, taking my hand and stepping forward into the sliver of moonlight shining through the open door.

  “Who the hell are you?” The question contains more slur now than before, and I feel a pang of unease.

  “John. John Rutrough.”

  “John John Root Trough,” the boy repeats in a slow, mimicking voice.

  Laughter floats out from the other two shadows and seems to hang suspended from the rafters above us.

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  The boy in front walks over to stand in front of me. I can smell the alcohol on his breath along with the sickeningly sweet scent of something else I don’t recognize. “Now what does it matter who I am?”

  “Y’all better go on now,” I say, shivering even though the night air is muggy and hot.

  The boy stares at me as if he’s not sure I’m worthy of his attention. “Where are Matt and Becca? His car’s parked over at the mailbox.”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe walking in the orchard. They do that sometimes.”

  He glances back at his friends and snarls a laugh. “Matt’s gettin’ it in the orchard. I should have known.”

  “Please. You have to go,” I say, afraid my parents will wake up and come down to the barn.

  He glances at me, his eyes squinting as if he’s having trouble focusing. “What are you two doing out here, anyway? Y’all playin’ grown-ups?”

  The questions have something ugly at their core, and I feel a new wave of fear. I take a step back, and John reaches for my hand.

  “Aww, itn’t that sweet?” The boy lurches forward, reaching out to untie the strings of my bonnet. “Maybe we need to give you two a lesson in what real grown-ups do when they’re alone. Looks to me, John John Root Trough, like you haven’t figured it out yet, seein’ as how you haven’t even gotten her out of her bonnet. But then what else would we expect from a Dunkard boy? Hard to learn about the world hidin’ behind your mama’s skirt.”

  He yanks the bonnet off my head, one of the bobby pins in my hair catching. I yelp, and John lets go of my hand to give the boy a shove. “John, no,” I say. “Let it go!”

  The boy staggers back and then rights himself like a listing buoy. He stares at John for a moment, as if he can’t believe what he just did. His face contorts with anger, a black, drunken thundercloud of it. He pokes John in the chest with one finger and says, “That how you want to play then?”

  “Y’all get on out of here,” John says, and I hear the fear beneath the words.

  “We’ll go when we’re good and ready,” the boy says. “But first I think I’d like to see what’s under that dress. It’s gotta be somethin’ to be hidden so well.”

  John makes a sound then that sounds like a roar of fury. He charges at the boy. They stumble backwards, and I hear myself scream as if the sound is coming from someone else.

  John is no match for him, and they roll around on the dirt floor, kicking and throwing fists. I hear John groan, and I begin to scream for them to stop. The other two boys start trying to break it up, but the first one is much bigger and flings them off like paper dolls. John manages a swing that connects with the boy’s jaw and makes an awful cracking sound.

  Everything goes completely still then, the boy touching his face and staring at John in disbelief. The moment just hangs there, and I start to pray as hard as I know how that they will leave.

  But the boy erupts in a volcano of fury, running at John like a bull aiming to take down a wayward steer. And this is the moment I will relive over and over again. I see it in slow motion, the boy’s shoulder connecting with John’s chest. John reeling, arms flailing in mid-air. And then a horrible noise I can’t identify as he hits the ground. Like the sound of a nail puncturing a tire as the air starts to hiss out.

  I run to him, screaming, screaming. His eyes are wide open, an expre
ssion of shock frozen in place on his freckled face. And then I lower my gaze to the middle of his chest where the pitchfork tines have pierced straight through.

  I put a hand to my mouth and drop to my knees, air refusing to fill my lungs. I think it was this exact moment when for all intent and purpose, I stopped breathing. Trapped in the forever-haunting knowledge that if I had just picked up the pitchfork as I’d known to do, the ending might have been so very different.

  1

  Fix Sunday

  “The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have passed at home in the bosom of my family.”

  - Thomas Jefferson

  Now

  Martha Miller loved Fix Sunday.

  Especially one as nice as this warm, early spring afternoon when members of the Booker Hill Brethren Church flowed out the doors of the quaint white building onto the green grass surrounding it. Families extended invitations to follow one another home after the service for a meal and fellowship.

  Martha had never felt as adept at pulling it off as many of the women now surrounding her in the front yard of the church. Most of them she had known the majority of her seventy-four years, and she’d often wished that she could be like those who showed not a single sign of apprehension when a dozen cars ended up in their driveway, hungry friends and neighbors pouring out the doors.

  Martha’s own mother had always managed the day with grace and hospitality. As a child, Martha remembered Sundays when forty or more men, women and children would fill every table in their home, and even a few makeshift eating arrangements set up under the oak tree in the back yard – sheets of plywood on wooden barrels that were then draped in tablecloths. Martha’s mother had taught her well how to handle the preparation of food for an unknown number of guests. How to prepare huge pots of vegetable soup and apple cobblers early in the week that were then frozen and pulled out on Sunday morning where they were left to thaw so they could be quickly reheated after church.

  Martha and her oldest daughter Rebecca, Becca as they had always called her, had done just this the previous Monday, using canned jars of vegetables, tomatoes, corn, squash and okra, which they’d put up last summer from Becca’s bountiful heirloom garden. There would be no question that they had enough food to go around this afternoon, and for this Martha was thankful.