Laurel Falls-

Laurel Falls, Episode Five reveals wedding prep at Hillhaven Inn, a new hire at Highland Photography and a fresh act at Mountain River Theatre.

WEDDING - PART ONE

Millicent opened the door and leaned through. “Drum, are you dead in there?”

Drum rolled over to face her, but didn’t open his eyes. “Not likely, since I heard you yelling at me.”

“Are you planning on getting out of bed today?”

“I’m considering it, since we’re supposed to get married this afternoon. What time is it?”

“Past time for you to eat your breakfast; It’s getting cold, out on your veranda.”

Drum squinted against the glare, then groped his way toward vertical. “You’re making me lazy doing everything for me. I’m forgetting how to get along by myself.”

“Then you’d better practice getting along with me, Love; I’ve finally snared a keeper; I’m not about to turn you loose.”

Drum found his robe and tied it around him, grinned vacantly toward Millicent until his eyes focused. “You’d have to run me off with a stick. Let’s eat.”

By the time Drum gathered himself and made it out to the porch, Millicent was sitting at the table, pouring his beet juice. Drum reached for the glass, took a swallow, and sat down. “You keep feeding me this, and I might actually learn to like it in time.”

Millicent knew he was already learning to like it. “It’s good for you. Your blood pressure likes it. Would you rather I turn you over to the doctor?”

“Doctors have already killed most of the people I used to party with. I’ll trust you on this.” He took another sip of his juice, stirred in a pinch of salt, and finished it off.

Millicent uncovered a dish of scrambled eggs, toast, and creasy salad, slid the plate across the table toward him. “I’m glad you’re not superstitious. I don’t want to breakfast alone on my wedding day.”

Drum lifted an eyebrow. “We’re as married now as we ever could get,” between a fork-load of eggs and buttering his toast, “Annie Starling would have said we’re made of the same clay, destined for union before ever we were in this world.”

“Annie Starling would have agreed with Gerald, then. He tells me we share a soul.”

“For a ghost, your father is pretty insightful, Millie.”

Millicent laughed, put down her toast, and refilled Drum’s coffee. “The dead see life more clearly than the breathing do, I think. Souls like my father have laid by all our striving and wanting and hoping. Time doesn’t fly by them. They can be still and see forever and ponder what it all means.”

Drum looked away across the town toward Myrtle Mountain in the blue distance, smiled, as if to himself alone, then seemed to recollect his present, and turned back to Millicent. “Until you took me in, I wasn’t sure if any of it meant anything.”

“And what do you think now, dear Drum?”

“It means something.”

“It means what, exactly?”

“I don’t know what exactly, but it has a lot to do with loving you, Millicent Robbins.”

“Life has everything to do with love, Ben Drum, and my life has everything to do with loving you.”

“We started late.” Drum sounded somber and wistful.

“There’s time enough. Love makes her own time, and we’re going to be late for our wedding if we don’t start getting ready. Carry these out to the kitchen for me, please, Sir.” Millicent, stood, leaned over to kiss her Drum atop his head as he stared away again toward his mountain, but he looked up at the last instant and met her lips with his. After that unhurried exchange, Millie charitably swallowed her remark about his thinning thatch, and flew away to meet her day.

Drum sat still for a minute, pondered what it all meant. Tears blurred his vision. Momentarily blinded by his joy, Drum breathed his wordless thanks, then stood, and gathered up their cups and dishes.

~

Sharon Suttles unclipped her prints from the line and opened the darkroom door just as Drum came into the studio. She gave him a wry face. “I didn’t expect to see you in here today.”

Drum shrugged. “I just came by to see if you have everything you need for this afternoon.”

Sharon affected a hurt expression. “Don’t you trust your assistant?”

“I trust you with my life, Sharon, and today, you’re not the assistant; you’re the whole show.”

“You and Millie are the show, Mister Drum; I’m just the photographer.”

“The best photographer in town.”

“Better than Benjamin Drum?”

“With enough experience, you’ll be better, but don’t go around telling folk I said that. Actually, I just came by to pick up the ring.” Drum started up the stairs to his apartment.

Sharon called after him, as she laid the prints out on the work table. “I finished the books this morning. You might want to take a quick look at them while you’re here. I think you’ll be pleased.”

As she studied the prints spread before her, Sharon could hear Drum rummaging upstairs, opening doors, closing drawers. Was he singing to himself up there? What wondrous changes hath love wrought? No doubt, her stoic old Drum would return after the honeymoon.

Back down the stairs, he stood looking over her shoulder at the photographs. “Kellett’s Knob. Did you see any sign of Horace Kellett up there?”

“No, but that country will make you believe in ghosts. I talked Warren into taking me up there for the weekend. I needed to make some more shots for the Park Service brochure.”

“This one of the rocks, and that one over there… I like this one, too. I’m jealous; you know the High Balsams better than I, already. You and Warren must have patched things up.”

Sharon shrugged. “Well, a truce, at least. He still wants me to go with him to Germany after he graduates. He says it is the chance of a lifetime. I haven’t had my fill of Carolina yet, though. I don’t know what to do.”

Drum walked over to his desk, bent over the ledger. “I can’t advise you, Sharon. I wouldn’t want you to follow my example, certainly. I ran off to see the world when I was young, then came home to find my place in it. By then, I didn’t have much of a place left, and had to start over. All I can tell you is that you have to choose to live wide or to live deep, but you’ll be hard put to do both. Whatever answers your truest need is what you should do- Good Lord, Sharon; Highland Photography has made some money this month, and most of it is your doing, from the looks of these numbers. I need to give you a raise.”

“Then I might be able to pay my rent on time this month.”

Drum closed the ledger, poured himself a cup of thrice brewed coffee from the chipped and battered enameled pot sitting on a hotplate atop a file cabinet. “I’m serious about the raise, but I can save you on the rent, too. As soon as I get the rest of my stuff moved over to Hillhaven, you can have the apartment upstairs. Consider it a perk.”

“You’re just tired of me being late for work.”

“I’m the only one ever late for work around here.”

“Seriously, thanks for the offer. I’ll give it some thought and let you know.”

“See you at Hillhaven.” Drum waved, started to leave, then paused and turned in the open doorway. “Sharon?”

Without looking up from the photographs she was studying, “Yessir?”

“Add ten percent to your check from now, but if Warren doesn’t lure you off to Europe, you need to think about a partnership in Highland Photography.”

Sharon looked up wide-eyed from her images. “Partnership?”

“We’d share the profits. You do most of the work here already, and I plan to be around even less in the future.”

“What do you plan to be doing?”

“If I can persuade Millie to go with me, I’m going off to the High Balsams and find out what happened to Horace.”

Sharon looked up from her work, her interest piqued. “How long has it been since he disappeared? After all this time, people still talk about it.”

Drum, ever eager to talk about his mentor, “No wonder they do. Horace and Ted Mura were local legends. I doubt the Park would have ever been established without the two of them. I was away up north on my first real photography job when he was lost up there. Everyone agreed in time that he must be dead, but the Balsams are big and still roadless for the most part. You could hide an army among those mountains. Some still say he just got tired of people.”

“Surely you don’t think he’s still up there?” Sharon ventured a tentative laugh, seemed to think better of it and cut it short.

Drum didn’t smile when he answered. “Horace will always be waiting in the High Balsams for me to come find him.”

~

Alice laid out the vintage dress on the bed and shook her head. “Not exactly what I’d think of as a wedding dress, but the old thing is lovely.”

Millicent lifted the lace-trimmed hem and studied it. She’d been afraid to leave the dress to them, but Cora at Bradley Cleaners and Alterations knew what it meant to her, promised to tend it with utmost care and respect. Now Millie saw her trust had not been misplaced. The dress looked as if it had been made for this occasion. A couple of parted seams mended perfectly. Looking now, Millie couldn’t be sure just where they had been. “It was my mother’s. There never was a wedding, but she wore it only for my father. It will please him to see me married in it.”

Alice giggled nervously. “Mercy, Millie, you talk like he’s really here.”

Millicent held the dress in front of her and looked in the mirror. “Dear Alice, I’m here. That makes Gerald near enough.”

Alice helped her into the dress, fastened the buttons at the back, tugged at the shoulders, then stood back to appraise the effect. “Why, Millie Robbins, you’re an eye full. That dress fits like it was made just for you.”

“My mother was not that much younger than me when she wore it last. Stairs and luggage kept the fat off us both, if not the years. But it looked better on her.” Though, as Millie turned, assessing her reflection, the close-fitted long sleeves and her face emerging like a flower above the high neck, lace at throat and wrists, the whole effect like yarrow blooming on a spring meadow, she thought the mother’s dress looked well enough on the daughter. “Your shoes!” Alice shouted suddenly. “We forgot your slippers; I’ll go get them.”

Alice darted into the next room. Millie could not see the ghost, but she knew he was there. “Well, Gerald, what do you think?”

A ripple of light, or perhaps of shadow, flickered across the mirror. The dead are past thinking, but you are beautiful.

Millie was uncertain if she had actually heard the voice, or just thought it. Then Alice bustled back into the room, slippers in hand. “Were you talking to somebody in here, Millie?”

Millie smiled. “It must have been the ghost.”

~

Liza Charon sipped her tea and scanned the newspaper in her hand. She had the whole morning to kill before she went down to the Mountain River Theater to get ready for her show.

Her manager, Ted Harvey. had tried to talk her out of this tour. “Do you really think those hillbillies will throng to buy tickets to hear a foreigner sing ballads?”

“Trust me,” Liza told him, “they are still foreigners themselves, deep down. They will recognize a voice from home.”

Ted just shook his head, throwing up his hands in not entirely mock dismay. “It’s your money, dear; my cut comes off the top.”

So here she was, along with eight other musicians and a bus load of instruments, riding the rising wave of Celtic Folk out of the Greenwich Village coffee houses, down the Appalachians all the way to the wilds of Marshall County in Carolina. Liza didn’t tell Ted she hadn’t come this far just to sing songs to strangers.

She turned to the Social Events section of the Asheton Citizen, and halfway down the page saw what she was looking for, congratulated herself aloud, “Good job, Li; we’re just in time.” Liza scanned the article, Millicent Robbins and Benjamin Drum to Marry, smiled at the photo of the happy pair. “You’re together, at least; that’s a start.”

Ted tapped on her door. “I’m decent,” Liza called.

He opened the door and stuck his head in. “You coming down to eat with us?”

“You go ahead,” Liza said, “I think I will have breakfast up at Hillhaven and get reacquainted with the locals.”

Ted looked puzzled. “You never told me you’d been here before.”

Liza laughed. For no reason Ted could explain, her laugh always made him uneasy. “Oh, that was long before you, dear Ted. Just call me a cab on your way down, will you?”

To be continued…

Next week - the wedding.

Walk in hope-

-henry