J§ Telling the Bees ^ \ by Sharyn McCrumb §¿XÛ t«JS?(fl*®T*Í^I The road was even narrower than he remembered. It lurched and bucked through the granite spines of Unaka Mountains, cutting through tilting pastures and scrub forest like the dusty tongue of a coon dog lapping toward the Nolichucky River a few miles farther on. They weren't going that far, though. The trail to the old homeplace should lie past a few more bends in the road: there would be a mark on an outcrop of limestone, his cousin Whilden had told him, and a little turnoff where he could park the fourwheel drive. They would have to walk the rest of the way. " 'Course you can't drive up there," Whilden had warned him. "It's purt near straight up. We couldn't hardly get a mule up there to clear timber." That was fine with Carl. He would welcome the isolation, but he'd had a hard time convincing Whilden of that. "?-lord, Carl-Stuart," he kept saying. "You don't want to spend your honeymoon in that old place. Why there ain't no lights nor running water." He had even offered the newlyweds his own room, reckoning he could bunk on the sofa if they were so dead set on coming for their honeymoon. Carl smiled a little, remembering their phone 31 conversation. Whilden didn't come right out and say it, but it was plain enough that if he were a big-time engineer in San Francisco, he'd find a better place to take his bride than Cabe's Hollow, Tennessee. Carl wondered what Whilden would consider a suitable location for a honeymoon: Bermuda , Atlanta ... or Myrtle Beach, South Carolina? Elissa had talked about going to Mexico, but he told her that he wanted her to see where he'd grown up. The folks were dead, of course— except for a passel of cousins—but the land had hardly changed at all. He smiled at a couple of white-faced calves¦poking their noses through a fence: except for a score of years, they might be Bushes and Curly, lovingly raised as a 4-H project. Why had he been so insistent on coming back here? He hadn't been back to Tennessee in years. Perhaps it was some sort of familial instinct: this urge to bring his bride back to the family seat, as if the ghosts would look on her and approve. Anyway, he had wanted Elissa to see the hills. Maybe then she would understand why California 's mountains just weren't the same. His homesickness for the mountains was unassuaged by jaunts to Lake Tahoe. The silver-capped Rockies stretching out like a Sierra Club calendar left him unmoved, while these stubby weathered hills, silver with winter birches, made his heart tighten. Damn near twenty years, and he still thought ofit as home. "So these are your precious Appalachians ," smiled Elissa, nodding at a not-too-distant skyline. "They don't seem like mountains." "I know." He had thought about that when he realized that the Rockies were different from his mountains. The Appalachians don't stand back and pose for you, he finally decided. They come up close and hold you, so they don't seem so big and imposing. Cabe's Hollow must be about three thousand feet above sea level, but you didn't feel it, because you were in the mountains. Among them. "This is Cabe's Mill Road," he told her. He remembered the grist mill at the end of it, down by the river. It was probably abandoned now. He'd heard that Old Man Cabe had died, and he didn't suppose that Garrett would have stayed around to run it. Garrett always was a hell-raiser. Used to chase girls through the fields waving a black snake like a bullwhip. Maybe they'd go down and take a look at the mill sometime . Past a steep bend in the road, he saw the flash of an 'X' mark in yellow rock. "Here's the turnoff to the cabin." Elissa straightened up and looked out the window. "Good. I'm...