Harvestman Lodge (17 page)

“She arrived in a TV station news van.”

“TV news van … wait a minute … wait a minute! I might know that gal.”

“Tell me, then.”

“I heard talk over at the Cup and Saucer that one of the network affiliate stations over in the Tri-Cities, WVKT, I think, is putting a bureau office here in Tylerville. Because of the bicentennial, and Homecoming ’86. You know about Homecoming ’86, I reckon.”

“I know it’s a statewide heritage celebration, and that all the towns and communities are supposed to take on projects that fit the heritage theme and carry them out during the year. For Tylerville that works out easy, because what we do for the bicentennial celebration can count for Homecoming ’86 at the same time. Two birds with one stone.”

“Exactly right. And the TV folk know a bicentennial is a pretty big deal, a lot of good material for television. So it makes sense for them to put in a news bureau here to keep on top of all the goings-on.”

“So she’s probably a TV reporter,” Eli said. “She’s pretty enough for TV, no doubt about it. That trucker was really vulgar in how he talked about her, but he was sure right that she’s an easy sight to look at.”

“I’m betting she’s Ben Buckingham’s daughter. A Tylerville girl. Ben’s daughter works in TV. She started an intern, I believe. I swear the gal is pretty enough to be in movies. Sandy hair, nearly blonde … big eyes, beautiful face, fine figure … the full package.”

“What’s her name?”

“Melissa.” Lundy paused, rethinking. “Uh, no, not that. Melinda. Melinda Buckingham. Did she look to be right about your age? Twenties?”

“She did.”

“Gotta be her. I know the family. I go to church with the Buckinghams, and Ben even does some fill-in preaching for some of the rural churches, when they need it. I’ve heard him a time or two … real old-style hellfire and brimstone. Too much so for me, even though that’s what I grew up with.”

“What’s he do for a living?”

“He works in video, the big rising trend in these crazy modern times. Buckingham Video Services. Ben tapes weddings, graduations, special presentations, family reunions, anything people want recorded. He can transfer old home movies from film onto video cassettes for folks. Things like that. Him and Dot, that being his wife, operate out of a little house out on Bowington Boulevard, a place they converted into commercial space. They live in a house not very far from their shop. The family is Ben, Dot, their younger daughter Megan, and Melinda, back home for the moment now that she’s graduated college.”

“How old is Megan?”

“About eleven or twelve, I think. Megan’s got a head of curly black hair, like her mother. Not much resemblance to her big sister. Melinda used to work with them before she went off to college to study the news gal business.”

“‘News gal business.’ That’s a major I never noticed in any college catalog.”

Lundy laughed. “Yeah, that’s likely not what they called it.”

“So where we going this morning, Jake?”

“Well, a little later we’ll head up near Mr. Carl’s place. For that surprise I was telling you about. But we got some time before that gets started. Tell you what … I’ll take you out to a place that involves some Kincheloe County history you
ain’t
going to want to include in your magazine, and another part you surely will. We won’t have time to stop except maybe long enough to get some coffee-to-go at a particular store out there, ’cause we got to get back to Mr. Carl’s for that surprise I told you about.”

“Lead on, Jacob!”

“Flea Plank or bust, then!”

“
What
or bust?”

Lundy put on a poorly faked Asian accent. “Patience, grasshopper. Shut up and ride. All becomes clear to the patient man.”

They traveled to a corner of the county that Eli had never visited. The terrain was rugged, hilly and with abundant forest. It reminded Eli much of the western mountain country of North Carolina around the tiny town of Marshall, though not quite as shadowed.

But Marshall was a metropolis compared to the community Lundy drove them to … not that there was much to differentiate the community from the undeveloped countryside around it. A small post office with the name FLEA PLANK on its front was there, with a big and obviously very old general store standing beside it. Above the store’s long railed porch hung a sign declaring it to be FLEA PLANK MERCHANDISE AND GROCERY.

“What the heck is a ‘Flea Plank’?” Eli asked as Lundy parked in front of the store. “I never heard such a silly name.”

“Yeah, it’s a stupid old name, but this is a stupid old world. And you like the sound of it. Admit it. You’ll never forget the name of Flea Plank now that you’ve heard it, huh?”

“You’re right about that. But who came up with it?”

“There’s as many answers to that question as there are people who’ve tried to answer it. And as far as I’m concerned, there’s not a one of them answers yet that can be a hundred percent believed.” Lundy put on a dramatic 1930s-style radio announcer voice. “The verified origins of the Flea Plank name are a Kincheloe County mystery lost in the shrouding mists of time.”

Eli replied in his own old-style radio voice. “A mystery, you say? Then perhaps we can solve that mystery with some research and play it up in the magazine, eh?” He dropped the silly voice. “I was already thinking of doing something about community and road names anyway, and this would fit right in.”

“Eli, you can study the origins of Flea Plank from now until the end of time, and you’ll not find anything except the same stuff that’s been printed twenty times before. But I also know there’s going to be no stopping you from trying, so go at it, young man! If you talk to the Crosswaites, take all they tell you with a big old grain of salt, though. Especially Custer.”

“Who are the Crosswaites?”

“Oh Lordy! So much they boy still has left to learn! You telling me you been in Kincheloe for days now and nobody has told you about ‘them twin cousins’?”

“‘Twin cousins’? Not a word.”

“Son, in these parts the Crosswaite cousins are second only to the Sadlers in terms of fame … and in some quarters they outshine even them! Buster and Custer Crosswaite are dancers. Old-timey style, buck dancing and clogging and so on, but with their own twists and tricks. You ain’t seen nothing like them two on a dancing stage, I guarantee! Both of them born and raised in Flea Plank, and Buster still lives near here, out on Yankee Camp Road, which is up yonder way.” Lundy pointed.

“Yankee Camp Road,” Eli repeated, immediately drawn to the musicality and evocative quality of the name. “Got to be a story in Yankee Camp Road.”

“There is, and there’s no mystery about that one. It’s just a road that leads up to a place where the Federals had a camp during the war during the East Tennessee occupation. That’s another story I’ll volunteer to write for you.”

“Consider it yours, then, unless David says different.”

“Come on. There’s mighty good coffee in this store, made in an old-fashioned pot like the one Marshal Dillon had in his office for him and Festus. Good stuff. I’m buying.”

STEAMING POLYSTYERENE CUP IN hand, Eli studied the terrain as Lundy drove further into the hollow. He turned the truck rightward onto a narrower road, obviously long neglected by the county road department, that left the hollow and climbed up a forested ridge. The woods all around thickened and protruded toward and over the road. Small old houses of board-and-batten, plywood, or vinyl siding, along with trailers in abundance, stood in roadside clearings cut back into the encroaching woodlands. Eli pondered that a more cliched vision of Appalachia could not have been contrived by a Hollywood set dresser.

Lundy’s thoughts apparently were running along similar lines. He said, “A lot of this looks pretty dismal, don’t it? You know, Eli, some folks in this part of the country get upset with the hillbilly, rednecky way us Appalachianites are perceived and portrayed on TV and in movies and the like. And there’s plenty to complain about. A lot of nonsense out there, a lot of cliches about ‘backward’ folk like me. What we’re a lot less ready to admit, though, is that there’s times the stereotypes and cliches are pretty close to accurate.” He pointed past Eli toward a rough little porch-fronted house on the right side of the road. “I mean, look at that place over there … can’t you just picture Burt Reynolds come striding out of the door in his full 1973 Gator McKlusky glory, or his Bandit cowboy hat, lighting up a smoke? You know what I’m saying?”

“I think so. You’re saying that sometimes stereotypes and generalizations have at least partial root in truth.”

Lundy chuckled. “Righto! And let me tell you a little tale about that: here a couple of years ago Bowington College hosted a big seminar about how Appalachian folks are being ‘victimized’ in the way they are portrayed in movies and TV.
Dukes of Hazzard
and
Beverly Hillbillies
and all that. They asked me to come be part of the panel since I write all the time about Appalachian folks in my column. Well, I don’t do panels, so I told them no, but durned if Davy Carl didn’t decide it was me who should be the one to cover the dang thing for the paper, anyway. So there I was, listening to them pencil-neck academic types moaning and groaning about the poor country folk being hurt so bad because the rest of the country was seeing them as hillbillies and rednecks and all that. And you know what? Even though I’d refused to be on that panel and generally try to keep my big trap closed in situations like that, I ended up hefting my hind end up out of my seat and storming up to the microphone in the aisle, the one you were supposed to talk into to ask a question to the geniuses on the panel.”

“What did you ask them?”

“Didn’t ask a durn thing, but I told them a few things. Gave them a piece of my hillbilly mind. I told them, first off, to quit whining, that the Appalachian folk would be fine without being rescued by them. I told them that these poor ‘victimized’ people they were so fretful about came from generations of folk who’d walked into the wilderness and turned it into a place where their people could live and grow and do themselves proud. I told them that some of the first moves into government-by-the-people-for-the-people were made right here in these wild hills and mountains and valleys well before other folks had even much thought of such a thing, and that it was these same ‘victimized’ people who marched across and whipped old Pat Ferguson’s sorry ass at King’s Mountain. Later on, their descendants stood up when the Civil War commenced, looked the rebels in the eye, and said, ‘Thank you kindly, but we still believe in the grand old nation our fathers built and we’ll be proud to defend it against any who want to turn against it, so be warned.’ I told them eggheads sitting at that table that the Appalachian folk might be kind of backward in some ways, but that whatever they were, one thing they weren’t was a bunch of weaklings so puny they needed the protection of a bunch of pointy-headed intellectual types to keep them from being ‘victims’. Victims, my giant old butt! The folks in these backwater places come from strong stock, are strong folks themselves, and are among the best neighbors and friends you can find anywhere.”

“Sounds like you got kind of riled up, Jake.”

“Oh, I did! So riled that I figured somebody would come down and tell me to get back in my seat and shut up. But nobody stirred. Them eggheads on the panel just gaped at me with their faces all pale and their Adam’s apples bobbing up and down, so scared of this raving country wild man that they were having to swallow back their own spit. And the folks in the audience, well … you know what? They applauded me. Can you believe it? Gave me a big, long ovation! It was downright humbling, Eli, I got to say. All those pathetic ‘victims’ giving me a big old bold round of applause for speaking out for them to say maybe they weren’t really victims at all.”

“That’s a good story, Jake. Maybe we can have you put some of those thoughts down in a, well, calmer fashion and put them in the magazine as a kind of essay, or editorial column. What do you think?”

“I think you’ve got that magazine on the brain, son. You can’t seem to think about nothing else.”

“Somebody’s got to be thinking about it, Jake, or it isn’t going to get done.”

“You’re right about that. Time’s a-wastin’, as they say.”

“Hey! Whoa, what was that?”

“What?”

“That road we just passed … the road sign there said ‘Harvestman Lodge Road.’ I just barely caught it before we were around the turn and I couldn’t see it anymore.”

“Yeah, that’s Harvestman Lodge Road. And that is the thing I was talking about that you ain’t going to want to even try to put into your magazine.”

“Why? What is it?”

“Just a road, that’s all. Beyond that, just something best left forgotten and ignored.”

“What does ‘Harvestman Lodge’ mean?”

“Pretty much what it sounds like. There was a fraternal group back some years ago, that met in a lodge building up that road. Nice stout building, paid for by Sadler money. ‘The Fraternal Order of Tennessee Harvestmen.’ Started out in the 1920s as a good community organization for farmers, or ‘harvestmen,’ as they called their group just to sound more uppity. Then it became a case study in how things that start out good can spoil. Beyond that there’s not much point in saying anything else about it.”