Sour Notes, page 2
Just another way we were opposites. Dean wanted nothing more than to live his whole life in Miller County. I had been waiting for the freedom of high school graduation so I could flee.
Dean had gotten his wish, though not in the way he had thought. His whole short life had been spent in this place. Then he was buried in this cemetery. Trapped forever.
Not me. I needed to claim my destiny. I had known for years I wouldn’t find it in Miller County. It was out there. Somewhere.
The preacher’s voice carried across the cemetery. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…”
As I pushed open the iron gate exit, the hinges squeaked, but no one looked up. I stepped into the overflowing gravel parking lot. My rusty old Honda Civic—the foreign car Dad hated so much—waited among the minivans, pickup trucks, and Jeeps.
When I reached the car, the preacher’s voice fell silent. The whir of gears lowering Dean’s coffin assaulted my ears. I slipped inside and shut the door, mercifully blocking out that awful noise.
With trembling hands, I ripped off my tie and threw it into the back seat, on top of the duffel bag stuffed with my clothes. My two guitars rested safely in their cases. My amp was nestled in the corner. Everything I needed was in that car. I cranked the engine and backed through the cloud of blue smoke.
When I reached the road, tears welled up and spilled down my cheeks. I gently pulled off the sunglasses that I had worn throughout the service. I leaned toward the rearview mirror and touched the purple bruise around my eye. The last thing Dean had ever given me.
Nothing was left for me here. I turned my car toward the highway and my freedom.
2
Seventeen years passed before I returned to his grave. The dewy grass soaked the knees of my jeans as I knelt next to the gravestone and traced the raised bronze letters with a quivering finger.
Dean Thomas McDougal
Beloved Son, Brother, and Friend
April 30, 1988–June 4, 2006
I had never seen the marker. If I’d thought about it all, I assumed it simply had his name and the dates of his birth and death. During my sporadic calls home, we had discussed the weather, crops, and church. Surface topics. Things where no feelings got hurt and the expectations were light.
We rarely discussed Dean. Certainly never the accident. The funeral. The grave. Or the epitaph. It all hurt too much.
Had they chosen it before I left? Or did that come later?
Beloved Son
Our parents certainly adored him. The golden boy. The perfect child. Destined to live his life in this godforsaken town. That was what he’d wanted, and they loved him for it. Farm the soil. Go to church. Marry a local girl. Raise an heir. Saddle the next generation with the family farm. When life drew to a close, get buried in this church’s cemetery along with the rest of the clan. Just like had happened to McDougals for over two hundred years.
Beloved Friend
Dean’s friends had showered him with attention and accolades during his brief life. For as long as I could remember, he’d been at the center of every big event. His athletic prowess was on display as early as T-ball and Pee Wee football. If a group of friends gathered to play in the woods, he was the inventor of the games. On the playground at school, he was always one of the captains doing schoolyard picks.
They still chose me next to last. Only Xander had saved me from the disgrace of being left alone for the last draw.
Just in his last year, he was class president. Homecoming king. Captain of the football team and baseball team. Life of every party. Dater of all the pretty girls.
Beloved Brother
I’m the only person with a valid opinion on that topic. No one ever asked. If they had, I would have told them growing up as Dean’s little brother hadn’t been a picnic. Always being compared. Always coming up short.
But as frustrating as living in Millerton with Mr. Perfect was, living here without him would have been impossible. I’d never planned to come back.
And I didn’t… until my mother called. “Your father is dying. You need to come say your goodbyes before it’s too late.”
I pushed myself to my feet and brushed the grass off my black jeans. A gust of wind rolled down the mountains and across the valley floor. The trees at the edge of the empty cemetery offered little protection. My leather jacket creaked as I pulled it tight against my body and shivered.
I’d forgotten how cold a June morning in the North Carolina mountains could be. Despite years dressing for rehearsals on cold stages, I’d somehow failed to throw a sweatshirt into my suitcase. Maybe I’d been in too much of a hurry.
I hadn’t been on many stages in the last few years, though, not since Covid shut concerts down. They’d come back, but not for me. We’d had creative differences in my last band. They went in a different direction. That wasn’t the first time it had happened to me.
There would be enough time to worry about what to do next once I escaped Millerton’s clutches again. For now, though, I would stop in town to get a sweatshirt before going to the house. Besides, clothes shopping, even in the slim pickings of this town, was another good excuse to delay going to the house. I’d stopped at the cemetery to visit Dean’s grave for the same reason.
I plodded between the stones, much like I had on that last day. A few new graves were sprinkled about, but most were the same as I remembered. And most were McDougals.
As I neared the big iron gate that led to the parking lot, I paused at a faded, moss-covered stone with roughly carved letters. The day I’d first noticed it remained burned into my memory.
3
The one reliable adventure away from the farm had happened every Sunday—church. The old white clapboard building sat at the end of the gravel road running beside our farm, so it wasn’t far. Still, we’d dressed in our cleanest jeans and T-shirts and sworn we would be on our best behavior.
We sat in the same hard pew every week, fighting the urge to squirm lest we feel the rap of knuckles against the back of our skulls, and listened to the preacher’s booming voice rail against the sin of the week. If we sat still through the entire service, which was a challenging feat, our reward was to go outside and play while our parents socialized.
At five years old, Dean was still mostly stuck hanging with me. The older kids knew each other from school, something we hadn’t yet experienced, and preferred to hang at the far end of the parking lot, away from both parents and little kids like us. We liked it when Russ was there, but the Caldwells didn’t come to church every Sunday. “Scandalous,” our mother would whisper.
One Sunday, we exited into the summer warmth. As the older kids wandered away and ignored us, Dean announced he had a new game for us to play. Most of the games he invented ended up in me getting hurt by some silly stunt, but this one sounded harmless—whoever found the oldest tombstone in the cemetery won.
“We aren’t supposed to play in the cemetery,” I protested.
Dean’s eyes twinkled. “Freddie’s a chicken. Freddie’s a chicken.”
He’d hurled the ultimate insult, a name he knew hurt me the worst, mostly because it was true. Dean feared nothing, not even punishment. “I’m not, but Mom said—”
“Yep. Chicken.”
I threw my bony shoulders back and did my best tough-guy imitation. “I’ll do it.”
For half a second, I thought I’d surprised him, but a mischievous grin crept across Dean’s face. He had, of course, known exactly how to get me to do what he wanted. “What’s the bet?”
“Why we gotta bet?”
“What fun is a game if the winner don’t get something?”
He would be the winner, of course. “We could play for funsies.”
Dean rolled his eyes. “Funsies? You’re such a little kid.”
Backed into a corner, I retorted with the only thing my five-year-old mind thought of. “Am not.”
“Then bet.”
I blurted out the first idea that popped into my head. “Loser does the winner’s chores after church.”
Dean’s grin became a full-fledged smile, showing off the gap where he had lost his first two baby teeth—months before me, of course. He offered his hand to seal the bet. “Deal.”
My stomach sank, but it was too late to back out. I would be stuck doing whatever nasty task he was supposed to do out in the barn. And I would still have to do my normal chores—sweep off the front porch, pick up the branches in the yard, and weed Mom’s flower gardens.
We shook hands. I raced from grave to grave, checking the dates on the markers. I ignored the newer bronze plaques and shiny granite stones. The older stones, however, offered promise. World War II. World War I. Then the 1900s blended into the 1800s. A large cluster marked the Civil War era. After that, the dates became harder and harder to read on the faded stones.
One name, however, appeared over and over. McDougals stretched back over the decades and centuries. Until that day, I had never pondered how our family had come to this remote valley.
I looked for Dean to ask. Rather than sweating or racing about, he was sitting on the ground beside a stone near the picket-fence gate to the parking lot. His face beamed with amusement and confidence. I knew I’d been beaten. Again. Dean always won.
Dejected, I dragged my feet over to him and studied the stone behind his back.
Hobard Samuel McDougal
February 21, 1763–November 23, 1791
“Who is that?”
Dean lay back and stared into the sky. “The first McDougal.”
“First ever?”
He snorted and slipped a blade of grass into his mouth, letting the stalk hang out in a mirror image of Dad. “No, silly, the first one here.”
Mesmerized, I gazed at the stone. “Where did he come from?”
“Ireland.”
“How did he get here?”
“Boat.”
I waved my arm at the surrounding mountains. “How?”
“A boat to America, stupid. He walked or rode a horse or something to here.”
Despite the sting of defeat, that was, I had to admit, pretty cool. “How do you know he’s the first?”
“Dad told me. Hobard was supposed to live with some cousins in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh or something, but it was too crowded, and people didn’t like Irish back then.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t know. Just didn’t.”
“That’s stupid.”
Dean shrugged it off. “So he kept looking for a place to call home and followed the mountains all the way down until he came into this valley. Wide-open land. No one here. Perfect for farming.”
It wasn’t until years later that I learned the Cherokee were here before our family. Ultimately, most of them were driven out of the area. On the day I’d learned about Hobard, though, I hadn’t known any of that. “So he’s, like, our great-grandpa?”
“Great-great-great-great…” Dean’s face scrunched in thought. “I don’t know how many greats, but Dad told me lots.”
When I was sick, Dean hung out in the barn with Dad so Mom could look after me. It wasn’t Dean’s fault, but I was still always jealous of all the stories Dad told him. Dean, of course, knew that, so he shared the stories to bug me, just like he snuck animals into my room to scare me.
But him telling me all these details also explained something else. “So, you knew he was buried here ’cause Dad told you?”
“Yeah.”
“And you knew he was the oldest?”
“Yeah.”
“So you cheated.”
Dean sat up and glared. “Did not.”
“But you knew.”
“Didn’t say I didn’t.”
“That’s cheating.”
“No, it’s not.”
“I’m not doing your chores.”
“Yeah, you are. You shook on it.”
“Don’t count ’cause you cheated, cheater.”
Dean stood up and balled his fist. “Take that back.”
“Cheater. Cheater. Cheater. Cheater.”
Dean shoved me. It wasn’t the first fight we’d ever had, not by a long shot, but it was the first at church.
All these years later, I still felt the sting of tears rolling down my face, mixed with the blood dripping from my nose, as our dad held his sons apart with his powerful grip on our shirt collars.
I ran my fingers along the top of Hobard’s stone. The fight was as clear in my mind as if it had happened yesterday. That was the way Millerton was—the ghosts of the past always haunting. Hobard Samuel demanded thanks over the centuries for bringing the McDougals here.
What haunted me the most about that day wasn’t Dean’s cheating. Or the inevitable fight that broke out. Or even Dean’s grin and triumphant laugh. He didn’t care about the bet, chores, the coming punishment, or even Hobard. All he cared about was winning. Beating me.
What galled me was what happened when we got home from church. Dean’s punishment was cleaning out the barn, a task he liked to complain about but really enjoyed. He was outdoors, doing physical work, and sweating. Even at the ripe age of five, he already liked that stuff.
Me? My punishment was doing Dean’s original chores that day, in addition to my own. To pay off the bet. To let Dean win.
“A deal’s a deal,” Dad said.
4
Beckett’s Feed and Seed looked the same as it always had—another time warp from my growing-up years in Millerton. A tall chain-link fence encircled a sprawling gravel parking lot. Tractors for sale, both new and used, were parked along the front beside rows of farm implements. Stacks of various sizes of pipes—both PVC and concrete—and rolls of wire fencing lined the rear.
A long building stretched through the center of the property. The bulk of the building was an open warehouse stacked with seed, fertilizer, hay, and feed. Workers scurried about, loading supplies into pickups and flatbed trucks backed up to a dock. Men in overalls, jeans, flannel shirts, and muddy work boots clustered in groups as they swapped town news and tall tales.
The part of the building closest to the lot’s entrance was my target. Enclosed with plate-glass windows, the store housed supplies for household cleaning, pets, and other basic needs for farming families. For clothing that was more about durability than fashion, Beckett’s was the place.
In the rare years of abundant harvests, Dean and I received new clothes. Not just new-to-us clothes from the church bazaar or Goodwill. In those good times, we were allowed to buy never-worn-by-anyone-else clothes. We would take off half a day on a Saturday, an uncommon break from farm chores, and go shopping.
Not to Asheville, of course. Our old man had an expressed opinion of how dirty, dangerous, and sinful things were down there. Of course, as we became teens, that only made the city more attractive to us. But as kids, we were stuck with Beckett’s. Dad said everything a man ever needed could come from there.
That was true enough, if that man was a farmer. Dean and Dad were as happy as pigs in mud, flipping through racks of Carhartt jeans, flannel shirts, and work boots.
I wanted more, but I was smart enough not to complain. New was better than Dean’s old stuff. At least new didn’t stink of sweat and grime. “Beggars can’t be choosers,” Mom always said.
And that was true now too. I needed a sweatshirt. As tempting as it was to spend a couple of hours driving down to Asheville to find an actual store, I needed to eventually see my parents. I knew I could only delay for so long.
I parked among the smattering of cars near the entrance and got out of the SUV. My foot no sooner touched gravel than heads swiveled in my direction and people gawked.
When I had landed at the Charlotte airport a few hours earlier, a nondescript beige sedan awaited me in the rental lot. A shiny black Escalade—exactly what a successful, rich rock star would drive—had sat a few rows over. For my triumphant return after leaving Millerton seeking fame and fortune, I needed to look like I had achieved it.
Standing in the parking lot of Beckett’s, though, I regretted my impulse. Among the Jeeps, trucks, sedans, and minivans, a big SUV with tinted windows stood out. The people staring weren’t thinking of a celebrity. The vehicle screamed lost tourist or, worse, one of those part-year residents who summered in those monster homes perched high in the mountains.
And if the car didn’t attract enough attention, my long hair, tattooed body, and black clothing would. I felt their eyes crawling over me.
From some distant memory, Dad’s voice came to me. “When you’re going through hell, march straight through.” I threw my shoulders back, straightened up, and walked confidently toward the front door. Let them think whatever they wanted. I had nothing to prove.
Besides, I’d been gone for seventeen years. No one would recognize me.
A group of men, all focused on me, huddled beside a mud-splattered farm truck. I probably knew them all, if I hadn’t blocked them from my memories, but one stood out and made my heart skip a beat. He leaned back against the side of the vehicle, one leg cocked and the sole of his work boot resting on the tire. A tight-fitting T-shirt advertising beer stretched across his broad chest and even-broader belly. His sunburned, hairy arms were thick, his hands stuffed in his pants pockets. A day’s worth of stubble grew on his cheek, puffed out from a wad of tobacco. A worn brown ball cap was pulled tightly over his head.
Despite the toll the years had taken on him, I knew Blake Torrence at a glance. He had been proud of his muscles and liked to use his strength on littler kids like me. He’d always seemed to have a cut or bruise from scuffles. I’d done my best to avoid him, but that was difficult since he was one of Dean’s close friends ever since he and Dean had come to blows back in the first grade.
Dean could throw a punch and was fearless when a fight broke out. On the football field. On the basketball court. Even in a dugout-clearing brawl on the baseball diamond. And, as he’d proven in that church cemetery, with his little brother who’d dared to call him a cheater.
