Coming Home (Norris Lake Series), Page 2

  So, it wasn’t a surprise when after weeks of hounding me, I let her talk me into going out one night with her new boyfriend and his best friend as a blind date for me. Her boyfriend was tall, dark and handsome. Mark was a senior at the University of Tennessee studying avionics and was a candidate for the U.S. Air Force wanting someday to be a fighter pilot. He was a swashbuckling, fearless, chance-taker on a blue ninja speed motorbike. He was also a bartender at the country club in Oak Ridge which was about 30 miles south west of Knoxville.

  Ben, his best friend was a lot like him but different in many ways. He was shorter, about 5 ‘9” with a stocky, short, muscular build. Dimples which cut deep in each cheek and the cleft in his chin made him a beautiful Kirk Douglas look-a-like. His red hair was short in a military buzz cut and he had beautiful azure blue eyes which twinkled when he smiled. He was also a daredevil with aspirations to be a Blackhawk chopper pilot and a red ninja bike to demonstrate his death defying attitude.

  The fateful day came. Sherry and her boyfriend chose a four-star restaurant in downtown Knoxville off of Cumberland Avenue called the Copper Cellar for the fateful night. The restaurant boasted expensive, succulent dishes and an extensive wine cellar. My date was arrogant and self-centered and I didn’t care for him much. Ben just wasn’t my type. None the less, I was determined to make the best of it so we drank wine and laughed with no cares, as only the young can do.

  At the end of the evening my roommate went her separate way with her boyfriend and I was stuck for a ride home with the arrogant blind date. He was irritating and had a smart mouth. I knew that we didn’t have anything in common and was anxious for the night to be over. He stopped in a parking space in front of my condo and I reached for the door handle wanting to be out and away from this asshole. It was obvious that we couldn’t stand one another, from both of our perspectives. I said goodbye and put one foot out the door.

  He reached over and held my hand pulling me close to him for a goodnight kiss. I recoiled and jerked away but a consistent pull combined with the wine made me relent so it could be over and I could be out of the car. I found myself pressed against warm, inviting lips and felt a hot flash of lightning race through my hand and lips straight to my toes. It was nothing like I had ever felt before. It was an instant of lust ignited by passion and a deep seeded need, all competing at the same time. I pulled away breathless and panting.

  Ben and I looked deep into one another’s eyes for a moment and then he smiled a sweet sardonic, self-confident smile as if he owned the world and knew it. I pulled myself away and stepped out of the car, slamming the door behind me and double timed it down the steps to the front door of my condo. With a twist of the lock, I opened the door stepped inside and closed the door behind me with a sharp click.

  The next day I came home from my statistics class and saw the two ninja bikes out in front of my condo, again. It was a two story condo above a one story condo. My downstairs neighbor was also a graduate student who was working on a nursing degree. In fact most of the people in the condo community were escapees; graduate students who were lucky enough to live off campus who had tired of living so close to the University of Tennessee and the constant campus nightlife.

  The living room, kitchen and dining room were all one long room about 60’ by 50 foot. On the front of the condo was a small porch but the back had a large wooden deck which overlooked a dense cope of woods. As I walked through the door, I was not surprised to see my blind date sitting in my living room in my favorite tan leather recliner watching television and drinking a beer.

  I dropped by backpack on the counter which divided the kitchen from the dining room and opened a cream colored refrigerator to get a diet coke, ignoring the intruder for the moment. Looking around, I noticed my roommate was missing but heard voices upstairs. They were noises which suggested that I shouldn’t make my way up there to find out what was happening.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “I stopped by with Mark to visit Sherry.” I stared at him as I leaned on the counter. He set his beer on the nearby coffee table. He leaned forward in the chair and turned off the television with the remote control.

  “Truce?” He said. “We got off on the wrong foot, Red. Let’s at least be civil given Sherry and Mark are together.”

  “I can be civil but don’t expect anything more,” I replied a little sullenly and without much conviction, not sure if I had it in myself to be civil to someone who was so arrogant and self-centered.

  “You want to go for a ride?” Ben asked. “Sounds like they just got started and are going to be a while”.

  My weak spot is motorcycles so I barely hesitated since I hadn’t been on a ride in years. I mean, it’s just a motorcycle ride. What could happen?

  “I promise to be good”, he reassured me.

  I shrugged trying to be non-chalant. “Sure. Why not?”

  Moments later, I mounted up behind him, wrapped both arms around his waist and we drove off at breakneck speed the wind wiping around us. I pulled him closer as I held on for dear life. I tucked my hands into the pockets of his black leather jacket and he put one hand down against my thigh pushing the inside of my leg against the outside of his. We flew winding through downtown Knoxville and then out of town north on 65 exiting at the Clinton exit only to end up near Norris, Tennessee.

  Winding up the road next to the Clinch River below the dam, the water’s depth was measured in feet and you could see the black rock of the river bead. Trees lined both sides of the road creating a dark, green, comforting canopy over the quiet road. A brown grist mill with a large paddle wheel whipped by on the right. Miles later he slowed the bike. We stopped along the river and got off. The cool breeze of autumn blew in the sweet smelling scent of woodsmoke from the surrounding the area.

  We pulled off our helmets and then sat on the bank of the river and talked finding we had more in common than I would have ever thought. We liked the same movies and books. We had similar dreams. He loved my red hair, freckles and green eyes putting on an Irish brogue and calling me “Red”.

  As the late afternoon waned into the evening, we regretfully climbed back on the bike and headed back for Knoxville. Arriving at the condo, we found that we had it to ourselves and a note on the counter told us that Mark and Sherry had gone to a campus party and not to expect them back that night.

  Our lips touched again that evening with a flare igniting passion that could not be extinguished. Naked and sweating, hours later, I had found what it meant to feel truly fulfilled as a woman, something no man had ever done before. He made me forget about wanting sex and found instead a place where passion, sex and love all came together without wanting any of it. The feelings I had that night were an inevitable tide racing forward that I couldn’t and didn’t want to stop. It was that day that I fell in love with Ben.

  The years of school passed and we studied. We talked about house plans and chose names for children that we would eventually have. I dreamed of red headed twins and our future; little league games leading eventually to graduations and grandchildren.

  At one point, I moved in with him and his brother, Joey, but it was short-lived. One evening we received a call early in the morning hours. It was the hospital calling to tell us not to hurry because Joey was dead; a car wreck victim.

  Ben took it hard and distanced himself from everyone who cared for him. He was never the same. Eventually we grew apart. My coop education in Houston, leaving him alone in Knoxville made him easy prey to other women and drove one too many spikes between us.

  One fall I came back from Houston to visit him. He lived in a third story apartment on campus. He welcomed me with open arms. My eyes were opened to what truly happening when the woman next door stopped by to say hi to him and I could hear their passionate argument through the closed door. It was then that I realized that she and he had a relationship that was more than just next door neighbors.

  We half-heartedly tried to make it work when I moved back
to Knoxville for my final semester at the University of Tennessee. I had a condo about three miles from campus across from the Peninsula Insane Asylum. Ben was working at the Half Shell which was an oyster bar on Kingston Pike. I came into the Half Shell one night to see him and he broke the news to me. He wanted to date other people. I was upset and stormed out of the bar vowing to marry the first man who asked me.

  I went from there to a bar where I met a man in a navy uniform. He looked at me across the bar and before I knew it he was standing at my elbow wanting me to dance with him. He was 6’4” with dark hair, blue eyes, and devastatingly good looks. Dominic asked me to go home with him and I did him one better. I took him home with me to my condo. He stayed well into the early hours of the morning.

  It was a Friday and I suggested that we go to Gatlinburg for the weekend. We spent an ideal weekend walking the streets of Gatlinburg and looking through the shops then retreated back to the chalet for more sex – sex in each bedroom, on the deck and several times in the hot tub. None of it was as heart wrenching as with Ben, but Dominic was beautiful like a Greek god and it was a way to forget that my heart was breaking. I didn’t talk to Ben once during the weekend.

  After the good times were over, Dominic and I went back to my condo, the one that Ben and I had once shared. Ben had been looking for me and realized that I was gone. He had gathered his things, the clothes and some of the furniture and left. I cried myself to sleep shouting to myself “good riddance.” He didn’t want me and gone were all of my stupid girlish fantasies.

  Years later I heard that he had become a Blackhawk pilot and was deployed to the middle east. I was happy he’d achieved his dreams. Six months after that, I saw one of his friends at a party and heard he’d died in a chopper crash. A part of me died, just like my dreams. I never spoke of him again, but thought of him often, wondering what my life would have been like had fate treated us differently.

  Chapter 2

  Dear Diary,

  It’s cold today. Grandmother says the clouds look like snow but father says that the signs aren’t right yet. Grandfather passed away two weeks ago and I miss him very much. He gave me this journal for my birthday last month but I hadn’t yet started writing in it. Before he died he asked me to write down our family’s history and the history of our village so my children will remember where we came from. It really didn’t seem important until Grandfather died. Now it seems important because I didn’t pay attention to him and take him seriously. This is almost a way to make it up to him. No one knows where our ancestors came from originally; not really. Grandfather says we are different than other people and that other people saw that we were different so we were forced to move farther and farther into the deep, unsettled areas of the country time after time. It wasn’t the way we looked but our beliefs that set us apart. Grandfather talked about the time that the village packed the contents of their houses in the dark silence of the night and moved from Salem along the great river. At one time some of our ancestors were even burned at the stake and said to be witches. Of course that isn’t true. At least I haven’t ever seen a witch. Our ancestors came to the new world along with thousands of others in search of religious freedom and the promise of prosperity in the green lands of the Americas. They found the existing communities in the north wrought with the same type of religious chains. Stodgy, tightlipped preachers still thought along the narrow lines of fire, brimstone and an Anglo-Saxon puritan lifestyle. In America there were still chains, but of a different kind. So they moved south, following the sun’s warmth to the tall Appalachian mountains of east Tennessee. Grandfather talked too about times when he was little. He watched the tall men who had long black hair and stood so proud come talk to the elders of the village. The men spoke a strange language with their hands and helped us learn how to survive during the harsh winter snows. I miss grandfather especially today when it is cold outside and I think of all of those times we sat in front of the fire and listened to him read from the Bible. And the sixth angel poured out his vial upon the great river...,” she read softly to the child at her knee. A sharp knock sounded on the door. Placing the book on the low wooden table, she stepped back into the darkened hall pulling the door closed.

  “You stay there, boy,” she said gently and turned the key in the lock.

  On the stooped front porch the deputy knocked again loudly, twisting the door knob only to find the door securely locked.

  "Mrs. Connellson, are you in there? This is Sheriff Kane. I need to talk to you." He paused a moment listening for the sound of movement from inside the house. "It’s important that I talk to you Mrs. Connellson. You can’t keep going on like this forever. You know why I am here,” he called and waited again. “The eviction is final and you are going to have to leave." He walked across the sagging wooden porch and peered through a dirty window looking into the parlor for any sight of life.

  He hadn’t wanted to drive all the way out in the hollow to make this visit but Mrs. Connellson never came into town, living without any of the modern conveniences like electricity or running water. It was foolish since the Connellson property sat smack dab in the middle of some well-to-do old family summer homes that lay along the bank of the river.

  Mrs. Connellson was a practically a hermit whose husband had died years ago, leaving the old woman alone to fend for herself, no family, no friends. There had been rumors of a daughter and a child a long time ago, but no one remembered seeing either of them for several years.

  It was just his luck that Mr. Tarlington, a large gray haired man, who was both wealthy and politically well-connected, was both Mrs. Connellson’s neighbor and a prominent leader of the wealthy summer crowd had bought much of the surrounding land to hunt wild boar, deer and black bear. Sheriff Kane knew that Mr. Tarlington had pulled the right strings to get rid of Mrs. Connellson. Tarlington had paid the back taxes on Mrs. Connellson’s property and had found a way to acquire her land to add to his vast holdings. There were rumors that Tarlington intended to build a private hunting lodge on this spot to entertain his political friends.

  Luckily for the sheriff, Tarlington spent most of his time between Knoxville and Nashville. Tarlington’s son, Robert, on the other hand owned a trucking company in the nearby town of Clinton. The trucking company was growing and Tarlington, Jr. had branched out into construction buying up land every chance he got. The Tarlington’s were ready to build their trendy lodge and had a design for a posh planned neighborhood nearby to replace outdated this dwelling.

  The sheriff shook his head sadly. It was too bad that the rich were able to push others around at will, but then again it had always been that way and always would be. He’d been living around these parts for a good longtime, moving from Charlotte, North Carolina with his parents when he was a teenager, so his father could work for the Tennessee Valley Authority, as it grew, producing power for towns all over the southeast. Now years later, he owned the local hardware store and acted as the town’s only source of the law. Kane had a wife, a nine-year old daughter, a seven-year old son, and a new baby, so didn’t have the luxury to just walk away from tasks that brought a bad taste to his mouth.

  He took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his brow. He wondered what his wife, Marie, was doing now; probably fixing the kids’ lunch. As a shock of grayish brown hair fell across his eyes, he squinted through the second window into the house’s front darkened room. The ramshackle farm house was built of graying brown wood that had seen better days. Two old red brick chimneys looked like bookends against the wood with a rusted tin roof atop the entire structure.

  The area around the house was worn bare as if its occupants never strayed too far. A slanting wood building with a crescent moon on the door, built of the same weathered wood, stood about a hundred feet from the back of the house with a large garden full of ripe vegetables growing nearby. He guessed that the house had been built back around the time of the civil war. It had probably been a slave master’s house for one of the old southern mansio
ns that lay a few miles away.

  Inside the house, the woman shuffled from the front door back to stand quiet guard over the basement door. The sheriff turned and stood on the porch looking out at the yard.

  "Mrs. Connellson,” he yelled. "I am leaving you these papers. You read them and I’ll be back this evening to help you move. Get your things together and Mrs. Connellson, I ‘m sorry about this. I stalled as long as I could, but I’m afraid even I can’t stop the eviction this time,” he spoke loudly talking to the air. He felt a little foolish, but was confident that he had heard some sounds inside the house.

  As he walked back to his car, he shook his head. He hated this part of the job, throwing an old woman out of her home. Climbing into the Ford Bronco, he swore under his breath, “Damn that Tarlington to hell. I hope someday he faces the same threat”. As the engine coughed to life and he rolled forward down the long overgrown drive back to town.

  She leaned against the wall of the hallway as the car left and heaved a sigh of relief. It felt as if it was the first breath she had taken in the long minutes that the sheriff had stood outside her door. Her chest hurt and she didn’t know if it was the lack of breath or her heart aching with despair. The time she’d stolen to stay in the house was but a brief reprieve, but maybe it would be enough.

  Turning to the basement door, she twisted the key and called softly into the darkness of the deep hole that had been dug out as a root cellar.

  "Come out there’s nothing to be afraid of now." She felt something sharp against the palm of her hand and then an intense pain as sharp teeth grazed the meaty part of her palm.

  "Boy, stop it!" she gasped in a sharp hard tone. Putting both arms around the child she half carried the struggling form towards the kitchen at the back of the house. In the distance across the lake she heard the sound of voices echoing against the late afternoon clouds. The form twisted out of her grasp scampering to return to the safety of the cellar.