Cumberland Furnace & Other Fear Forged Fables Read online

  James burst out of the thicket, kicking off a strand of honeysuckle vine that had snagged his foot. “Did you find her, Daddy?” he asked.

  I simply shook my head “no”.Slowly, I walked over to where that man had been standing. When I reached that spot, I noticed something sticking up out of the ground. Something old and rusty.

  Kneeling, I dug in the earth with my hands. It took some doing, but I finally got it out. It was a length of heavy chain with iron bands attached to both ends.

  Shackles.

  After that day, I never set foot within a hundred yards of the Furnace.

  Sometimes I think about that crisp afternoon in mid-October and believe that I never should have been there in the first place. Then again, when I stare at those rusty shackles hanging on my workshop wall, I begin to wonder. Just looking at the ugly things gives me an insight into a people I never really understood, or was raised to understand.

  Every now and then, I’ll lie awake in bed and see a glow upon the shade of my bedroom window. The window that faces Cumberland Furnace.

  It is not the silvery glow of moonlight, but the hell-hot brilliance of molten iron. I find myself listening for the roar of the fire, the grunts of exertion, the crack of the whip. But I hear nothing. Not the lonesome call of a whippoorwill, nary a cricket, or even the wind in the trees. Only silence.

  It is on such nights that I turn my eyes from the glow of the shade and pray for sleep.

  But sometimes it never comes.

  GRANDMA’S FAVORITE RECIPE

  My grandmother was a pillar of the community.

  Yeah, I know. You hear that about people all the time. But in this case, it was true. Sarah Plummer was a kind and loving neighbor, a faithful friend to those around her, and a great woman of faith. She cherished the little farming community of Harmony, Tennessee with all her heart and was very active at the local church. Every Sunday morning, come rain or shine, you would find her there, teaching Sunday school and playing accompaniment on the organ as the choir sang. She always visited the sick at the hospital and the shut-ins at the nursing home, and she mailed out cards daily, saying

  “Get well soon!” or “Missed you at church Sunday”.She visited every yard sale that was held in Harmony and bought at least one item, however insignificant, just to let them know that she had done her part.

  And Grandma baked. She was legendary in town for her confectionary masterpieces and her homemade cakes and pies. Her specialty was cookies. Raisin oatmeal, chocolate chip, and, my personal favorite, snickerdoodles. Whenever she got wind that someone was down and ailing, she would take out her ceramic mixing bowls and flour sifter, her cinnamon, nutmeg, and baker’s coca, and set to work. Grandma did everything entirely by scratch. No store-bought cake mix ever tarnished her kitchen counter. Pure ingredients were always used in just the proper amounts; flour, lard, fine cane sugar, and fresh country eggs from Will Turney’s farm a mile outside of town. Then came the additions that really gave Grandma’s desserts their sparkle. Big tollhouse chocolate chips, freshly-shred coconut, juicy raisins, pecans, and walnuts. When she was through and the pans of earthly delight were cooking in the oven, Grandma’s kitchen smelled like how I imagined the sweet aromas of heaven itself might be.

  Then, after the cooling, Grandma Plummer would place an even dozen on a plate and cover it with a tent of aluminum foil. Whenever the townfolk saw her walking through town with a silvery parcel in her hands, they smiled. They knew that she would be ringing someone’s doorbell soon and wishing them well, with both kind words and a special treat, the likes of which only she could concoct.

  Yes, my dear, little grandmother was a saintly woman.

  Or so I thought for a very long time.

  Sarah Plummer had not had an easy way during the ninety-six years of her life.

  She had been born to a hard-pan dirt farmer and his wife, a sickly woman who had been weakened by a bout of typhoid fever when she was a child. Grandma’s early years had been difficult, hungry ones and, in the year of 1917, she had lost her four brothers and sisters to an influenza outbreak. She had been the only surviving child.

  She had married at the age of eighteen to a man named Harold Plummer, who served as postmaster of the Harmony post office for nearly forty years. He had did of a sudden stroke in 1988. Being a housewife for her entire married life, Grandma lived modestly on Grandpa’s postal pension in the little, white-clapboard house they had shared on Mulberry Street.

  Like Grandma, I too had been dealt my share of hard blows throughout my childhood. When I was four years old, my father was fatally injured at the sawmill he worked at. He fell into a buzzsaw and bled to death before the paramedics arrived. Then a year and a half later, my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Despite a hysterectomy and numerous chemo treatments, she succumbed to the disease nine months later. I went to live with Grandma Plummer then and thanked the good Lord that she was there to receive me with open arms. She did the best she could to raise me into the man I have now become and I have nothing but gratitude for both the discipline she provided and the love she gave me during those tender years of childhood.

  Despite what people thought, my grandmother did possess something of a temper, however. Whenever someone hurt her feelings or she felt slighted or wronged, she would grow absolutely livid. But that never seemed to last very long. She would always take her Bible in hand and, sitting in her rocking chair on the front porch, pray until those anger lines smoothed from her face and that gentle smile returned once again. Then she would get up, go into her kitchen, and bake a peace offering.

  The first time I sensed that something wasn’t quite right with Grandma Plummer was shortly after my twelfth birthday. It was a balmy May that year and Grandma’s flower garden was brilliant with spring color; marigolds, hyacinth, petunias, and moss roses.

  There was a neighborhood dog from down the street, however, that had been trying Grandma’s patience lately. Buster was the hound’s name and he had dug up about every purple and blue iris that Grandma had planted along the driveway. I had pegged him in the hindquarters with a Little League baseball a couple times, but he kept coming back and wreaking more havoc. I suggested that we buy a BB gun – not necessarily to scare the dog off, but because I really, really wanted one at that age. But Grandma would hear none of it.

  A while later, she walked out the back door with a leftover piece of my birthday cake on a plate. She sat it down in the grass and, soon, Buster was there, chowing it down hungrily.

  “Why are you feeding the mangy mutt?” Iasked her.

  “Because even though Buster vexes us with his bad behavior sometimes, he is still one of God’s creatures,” she explained. “I’m repaying his transgressions with an act of kindness. Turn the other cheek. That’s the way the Good Book says it should be.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that. I stood and watched the dog wolf down my last piece of birthday cake. “If you say so,” I mumbled, scratching my head.

  The next day, Buster was staggering around in the middle of Mulberry Street, snapping and snarling and foaming at the mouth. The neighborhood kids – me included – watched in horror as Sheriff Tom Stratford shot the dog down with his service revolver. hey strung yellow police tape around Buster’s stiffening body until a man from the county animal control could come out. He showed up a couple hours later, scooped Buster into a black plastic bag, and hauled him off.

  No one in town could figure out how a healthy animal like Buster had contracted rabies so swiftly, with no signs or symptoms to forewarn anyone.

  But I had my suspicions.

  That night, after Grandma had gone to bed, I got up and took a flashlight from my nightstand drawer. Then I explored the kitchen pantry.

  Something had bugged me the previous afternoon, when Grandma had served that piece ofbirthday cake to old Buster. It hadn’t looked right. The sugary white icing with its red-laced baseballs and hickory brown bats had held a nasty grayish tint to it. And, that evening, when I ha
d gone in for supper, I had spotted a bottle sitting on the kitchen counter. A tall, skinny bottle that held a dark liquid. I just assumed it was vanilla extract from Grandma’s baking ingredients. Before I could ask, however, she had taken the bottle and spirited it back to one of the shelves in her pantry.

  The little closet smelled of cinnamon and garlic as I swung the pale beam of the light around, searching for that bottle. I found it a few minutes later, sitting on the shelf with her spices and baking supplies. Quietly, I reached to the back of the shelf and brought it forward, where I could get a better look.

  It was an old bottle; very old. It was tall and narrow, and sported a single dark cork in the mouth of the stem. A label – yellowed and curled at the edges by age – read:

  DR. AUGUSTUS LEECH’S PATENTED ELIXIR – CURES A VARIETY OF PHYSICALILLNESSES: GOUT, ARTHRITIS, IRREGULARITY, ANDCHILDHOOD ALIMENTS.

  A cold feeling washed over me at that moment.

  Augustus Leech. I had heard that name before… a story whispered over a crackling fire at a local summer camp when I was eight years old. A dark, lanky medicine show man with a top hat full of magic tricks, a song and a dance, and a patented elixir that guaranteed to cure all maladies and ailments. He had come to town in the early 1900’s and soldhis tonic for croup, anemia, and dysentery. And, in the process, poisoned half the children of Harmony.

  Legend had it that the menfolk had armed themselves with guns and pitchforks and, like a mob in an old Frankenstein movie, had chased Leech out of town. Deep down into a shadowy place called Hell Hollow… never to be seen again.

  Some kids in town had dared to explore the hollow, but I never did. I wasn’t a child for taking risks. Not with the share of tragedy fate had given me in my younger years.

  I picked up the narrow bottle. The glass seemed oily to the touch. I studied it in the pale glow of the flashlight. It was half full of a dark, syrupy liquid. Curious, I wiggled the cork until it pulled free. The contents smelled both sweet and sickening; like cotton candy and jelly beans mixed with dog vomit and the decay of a bloated possum at the side of the road. I didn’t breathe it in very deeply. It made me feel sort of lightheaded.

  Is this what Grandma had used to poison poor Buster? Or was poison too kind a word for what had been done? And where had she gotten the elixir? The stuff was absolutely ancient.

  In the muted glow of the flashlight, the dark liquid seemed to shift and swirl of its own accord. It almost appeared to change colors somehow; from pitch black, to blood red, to pond scum green, then black again.

  In the darkness of the pantry, something moved. A mouse savaging for crumbs perhaps. Or perhaps not.

  Hurriedly, I corked the bottle and slid it to the back of the shelf where I had found it.

  Back in bed, I laid there for a very long time before sleep finally claimed me. And, even then, it was not an easy one.

  The next time Grandma showed her true nature, I was a sophomore in

  high school.

  Our next door neighbors, the Masons, had suffered a very bad year. Bob and Betty Mason’s daughter, Judy, had endured a long bout with cancer and had passed away the previous week. I was pretty depressed about her death. I’d had a crush on Judy since sixth grade. I had even asked her out to a school dance the previous year, but she had turned me down. Grandma had watched the whole thing from her kitchen window and I think it made her mad, but she hadn’t said anything.

  It wasn’t long afterward that Judy Mason was diagnosed with leukemia.

  I had just stepped off the school bus a few houses down, when I saw Grandma standing at the Mason’s door, holding a plate wrapped in aluminum foil in her hands. I couldn’t help but smile to myself. The Cookie Patrol was on the roll again.

  As I made my way down the sidewalk toward our house, I could hear Grandma talking to Betty Mason at the doorway. “Things will be better,” Grandma told her in comforting tones. “All we can do is pray to the good Lord for strength through this difficult time.”

  Mrs. Mason nodded sadly and smiled. “We appreciate your concern, Miss Sarah. And thank you for the dessert. You know how Bob loves your sweets.”

  “It’s not much,” Grandma told her. “But perhaps it’ll provide a small bit of comfort to you during your time of need.”

  Betty Mason thanked her again and closed the door. I was nearly to the gate of the Mason’s picket fence, when Grandma turned around. That small, gentle smile crossed her lips; the same smile I’d seen a thousand times at hospital visitations and charity bazaars, and at church as she played her favorite hymns on the organ she mastered so well.

  It was her eyes that disturbed me. They held none of the benevolence that the rest of her face shown. They were hard, hate-filled eyes, peering from behind her horn-rimmed glasses like tiny black stones. Then, when she saw me approaching, they changed. They once again became the warm lights of Christian kindness that I was so accustomed to.

  “Home a little early, aren’t you?” she said. “Well, come on to the kitchen. I ‘ve got a fresh apple crumb cake cooling on the counter. I just took it out of the oven.”

  As I sat in Grandma’s kitchen that afternoon, eating my second slice of cake, I couldn’t have imagined that Bob and Betty Mason would be dead within a week. The following Thursday, their car had veered unexpectedly across the grass median of the interstate and plowed, head-on, into a tractor-trailer truck. Both had died upon impact.

  On the night following the Masons’ funeral, I had the strangest dream. One in which I was not a participant, but a spectator.

  I was in an old farmhouse. In one room a baby cried. In the other a frail woman wailed mournfully.

  I stood in a doorway between kitchen and bedroom. As the woman vented her grief, two neighboring women were silently at work. Lying across the eating table were the bodies of three children; two boys and a girl. All were dead; being prepared for burial.

  A man paced around the room like a bobcat on the prowl. His eyes burned with a rage only a father can feel at the loss of his children.

  I turned and looked into the bedroom. A baby – perhaps two or three months old –wept loudly from a hand-made cradle. Feeding time had passed, but the infant had been forgotten. And there was another child. A four-year-old girl who sat cross-legged in the center of a big brass bed. The girl didn’t seem in the least disturbed by the events that were taking place around her. Her eyes were focused on an object that stood on a cherrywood bureau across the room.

  It was a bottle. A tall, skinny bottle with a cork in the top. The label read DR. AUGUSTUS LEECH’S PATENTED ELIXIR.

  The bottle was three spoonfuls shy of being full.

  The little girl smiled. She was quite fond of Augustus Leech; the medicine show man who had driven his horsedrawn wagon into town and stirred things up a bit. She had watched, enthralled, as he performed incredible feats of magic, picked a few tunes on a five-string banjo, and touted his patented elixir as the “Cure-All of the Ages”.

  And, when her father wasn’t looking, he had slipped her a prize. A playing card with a picture of a fairy princess on the face.

  She had placed that card beneath her pillow last night and dreamed that she was in an enchanted kingdom full of ogres, dragons, and wizards. A place more real to her than the drab town of Harmony had ever been.

  Her baby sister continued to cry. Slowly, the girl left the bed and took the skinny bottle from the bureau. She knelt beside the cradle.

  “Hungry?” she asked.

  The baby continued to wail.

  She uncorked the bottle and unleashed a single drop. The infant rolled the dark liquid around on her tiny, pink tongue for a moment. Then grew silent.

  No more middle child, the girl thought. Only me.

  She smiled a curl of a thin-lipped smile… that girl with my grandmother’s eyes.

  I woke up in the darkness, my heart pounding. I climbed out of bed and went downstairs… to the pantry.

  The bottle was still there, even after all these years.
But it was only a quarter of the way full now.

  A cold feeling threatened to overcome me. I began to recall bits and pieces of conflicts during my childhood. Conflicts that didn’t involve me directly, but were always between my parents and my grandmother, my grandmother and friends and neighbors. An accusation of infidelity toward my grandfather. A heated argument over meddling interference with my father. A petty grudge between my mother and Grandma that echoed from years before I was born. Hurt feelings and imagined wrongs done to the matriarch of the Plummer family by townfolk and neighbors. But the dust had always settled and peace was always made.

  And, afterwards, there had always been sweets from Grandma’s kitchen.

  Followed by death.

  I began to wonder if she was responsible. That maybe she was poisoning folks with that ancient elixir that sat on the pantry shelf. But my mind couldn’t comprehend such a thing. The Masons had died in an unfortunate accident, like my father. A ninety-six year old woman can’t condemn someone to cancer or a fatal car crash by baking them a lemon meringue pie.

  I left the kitchen pantry that night, telling myself that I was being foolish; that my kindly grandmother had nothing to do with the misfortunes of the citizens of Harmony. But I could never erase that dream from my thoughts. And that little girl with the wicked grin on her face.

  Several days ago, everything just sort of fell apart for me and Grandma.

  It happened on Sunday morning, I was home from college for the weekend, sitting in a right-hand pew of the sanctuary. Church service was proceeding as it normally did at Harmony Holiness. Jill Thompson, the pianist, and Grandma Plummer at her organ, were playing “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” flawlessly. Then, before they had finished, Pastor Alfred Wilkes rose to his feet prematurely.

  The ladies stopped their playing. The entire congregation froze. Everyone was already on edge, as it was. Bad things had been taking place at the church in the wee hours of the night. Vandalism and desecration.

  It had begun two weeks ago. Someone had thrown rocks through three of the stained-glass windows. Then, later, an intruder had stolen the church’s 180-year-old King James Bible from a display case in the foyer and set fire to it on the stoop outside.