Morton River Valley Read online

  Synopsis

  From Toothpick House to The Raid, Lee Lynch has given us our most heart-touching stories of lesbian life. Join her again in Morton River Valley when Texan Paris Collins comes to town and gets to know the characters from the acclaimed Morton River Valley trilogy.

  Paris Collins changes jobs and homes every two years. Always, she leaves behind an astonished lover who refused to believe that Paris would move on. Now she’s taken a job in a dying New England industrial town where she meets Peg Jacob, a tempting local from an old Yankee family. Paris gets caught up in protecting the town from environmental threats and education budget cuts. And in protecting an angry gay kid from an impoverished, frightened and angry town. Does she also want to protect herself from Peg Jacob?

  Morton River Valley

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  Morton River Valley

  © 1992 By Lee Lynch. All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-60282-857-5

  This Electronic Book is published by

  Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 249

  Valley Falls, New York 12185

  First Print Edition: 1992, Naiad Press

  First eBook Edition: February 2013, Bold Strokes Books

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Credits

  Cover Design: Lee Ligon

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you, Akia Woods, for your generous help and gentle understanding.

  I’ll always be grateful to the late writer and teacher, Con Sellers, for sharing his wealth of knowledge.

  Heartfelt thanks to:

  Akia Woods, Jo Pierce, Christine Cassidy, and Moonyean, for helping me to approximately depict femme behavior and point of view; Ben Eakin and Tom Hayes of Austin; Carol Feiden for that harrowing drive into Morton River Valley; Deb Lovely, Morton River Valley born and bred; Ray for his assistance with the Italian language; the members of the Listen and Be Kind Writers’ group and the Ansonia, Connecticut Public Library.

  More recent thanks to Radclyffe for keeping my books available; to Connie Ward and Shelley Thrasher for helping me along my path; to author Lori Lake; and to my sweetheart, Elaine, for helping in every way.

  Dedication

  For Carol Seajay and all the booksellers.

  Foreword

  This is the second book of the Morton River Valley trilogy. Its companions are Dusty’s Queen of Hearts Diner and Rafferty Street. Each book stands alone, but shares locale and characters. Some of the characters originally appeared in my first novel, Toothpick House, and in short stories. In Morton River Valley I wanted to create a femme character and tell the story through her eyes; it was a challenge for a writer without a femme bone in her body. The Valley itself is a main character, and I attempt here to portray a post-industrial North American region that is struggling to absorb new immigrants in an economy with few jobs and fewer tax dollars to help them. Paris Collins is one of the heroines of the time, fighting to maintain the melting pot that is our democracy.

  Chapter One

  A freight train shouted a husky, boisterous greeting to the hills gathered along the Morton River, to the houses that jostled for space on the hillsides, to the woman just arrived in town.

  Paris Collins climbed the steepest street buoyant with excitement, hot even in the cool morning air of early autumn. The houses she passed were practical yet fanciful and emphatically individual. A dog barked in the yard of a dull brown clapboard which boasted stained glass windows to either side of its front door. A score of wary cats watched the dog from the sloping porch rail, steps and windows of a peeling wooden one-story. Next, sideways, was a bright pink ranch-style duplex of 1950s vintage. Across the street a brick Cape Cod was having its elaborately detailed trim repainted. Other than the whistling white-capped painter, she saw no people. The hillside felt like a ghost town. She looked over her shoulder, back toward the river below, and felt her gut contract: she was terrified of heights.

  “Nice day!” called an old woman at a corner mailbox.

  Paris inhaled with shock. The ghost town had produced a genuine ghost. Paris realized she was sweaty and her shins ached from the climb. In the shade of a healthy old oak, the woman craned her neck to see beyond the leaves and Paris looked too. Honking geese were flying south. “I can taste your New England fall in the air,” Paris said, giving a big smile.

  The woman was heavy but sharp-featured. She narrowed her eyes. “You're not from around here,” she told Paris.

  “That's a fact.” How did she look to a local? Paris Collins, an almost middle-aged woman in trendy stone-washed Levi's and jacket, bright cotton tropical shirt, tinted glasses and long hair turning dusky grey. Her style of dress was left over from two years in Florida, which she'd left just yesterday, and was aimed at females other than heterosexual grandmas.

  “You moving onto the Hillside?”

  She'd never owned a home in her life, but with a laugh she imagined moving into one of these Connecticut originals, planning a total restoration with enlarged thermopane windows and a lavender hot tub just for the sake of decadence. Perhaps she'd spent too much time on the west coast, where she'd lived before Florida. “I'm not sure where they're putting me up. I just got in yesterday.”

  “I suppose the new factories brought you to the Valley. All these newcomers taking the jobs out from under our men.”

  Her first reaction was annoyance, but she'd been around enough not to take native hostility personally. She laughed again and opened her arms. “Please! I'm here to help folks, not steal their jobs! I'll be teaching at Rafferty Center.”

  “The teacher! You were in the Valley Sentinel. You're here for those Vietnamese and Spanish pouring in. And the people in the projects. Tsk.”

  Would any of her students live in these houses? The nearest home was faced with split red asbestos shingles which faded, lighter and lighter, to the chalky pink of the original salt box building. One section seemed to lean against another, all at different heights, windows obviously sized to available materials. The magnificence of the garden made up for the distress of patchwork architecture. Wild growth began at either side of the walk and surrounded the house completely. Somewhere in the dense vegetation, hidden tomatoes gave off their warm ripe scent. Blue jays scolded, grackles clucked at a weathered feeder, sparrows chittered, flitting from tree to tree. She touched a leaning splintery post that pulled down instead of propping up the wire fencing. Within, green acorn and yellow patty pan squash, roses from yellow to deep purple, apples little more than nubs, jostled for life. She'd never had a garden.

  She swallowed a sad, tired sigh. People like this woman could make a newcomer squirm for a long time. “I reckon you always lived in the Valley,” she replied, nurturing, no, exaggerating, the soft old Texas accent which was all she'd kept of home.

  With a possessive sweep of her arm that took in the town, the river and the hills, the old woman answered, “A thousand years! My father built Rafferty Brass, the factory down there. My husband retired from Rafferty's as a mechanic. Our boys followed in their footsteps and retired before it shut down, all but my baby. Everything's plastic these days. They laid him off
without a cent…two years he's been out of work. Now that's wrong.”

  As Paris took leave of the woman and went on up the hill she wondered which home fit the woman, but she didn't look back: a stranger's curiosity is always nosiness. She wandered slowly past grey cinder block fencing and perfectly symmetrical terracing, past turreted three-story relics which cast their shadows onto tiny bay-windowed cottages.

  The climb had become work; she was heavy with the old woman's anger, with the worries she always brought to a new home. She was used to having to prove herself to communities, but this woman had gotten to her. I'm only 41, she thought, it's too soon to be sad and tired.

  The touch of fall had melted by noon; summer's heat had returned with a vengeance. After picking up her luggage and dragging it through the small downtown peppered with grimy but ornate granite banks and columned civic buildings, she collapsed into an air-conditioned diner booth. She swirled a long-handled spoon in a tall glass of crushed ice and lemony tea. If she hadn't known it was Friday she could have guessed by the smell of fish chowder steaming in the kitchen. Earlier she'd passed two Catholic churches within blocks of each other. At the counter a toothless man crinkled open a cellophane packet of saltines and broke them into his soup. A girl with spiked hair joked with the waitress. Someone banged pots onto counters in the kitchen.

  Miss Valerie had suggested meeting at Dusty's Queen of Hearts Diner because it was close to the apartment the Center director had chosen for her, but Miss Valerie was ten minutes late already. Paris idly studied the decor. The floor tiles were red with bold black patterns. Silver cylinders reached up from the floor to support red vinyl stools. The counter was red too, the tiles beneath it cream-colored all the way down to a red-tiled footrest that ran the length of the counter. She supposed this funny old diner in this funny old factory town touched a memory in her heart that led directly back to her childhood memories of the forties and fifties, a past life of nickelodeons and a victorious America full of plans. This diner gave her excited flutters, in a way cities like London and Rio de Janeiro never had.

  “More iced tea?” asked the waitress, a thin woman with frosted hair and a nice touch of makeup.

  “No, Elly, thanks,” she replied, reading her name tag. “I'm waiting for someone.”

  “Oh! Are you the teacher Venita Valerie's meeting? She was in for breakfast this morning.”

  “I hope I haven't slipped her mind.”

  “Is the old character late?” asked Elly with a laugh and a Southern drawl. Not Texas, but it sounded good to Paris: a stranger who looked happy here. No wedding ring. Maybe she took it off at work, but there was something about Elly that brought up Paris's lavender antennae.

  “Typical. She's probably explaining algebra to somebody like me with about as many brains for math as it takes to run that cash register.” She sank into the booth with a weary relieved sigh. “Did you find a place to stay, honey?”

  “I spent last night in an enormous musty, nineteenth-century guest house. I can't believe Morton River doesn't have a motel, not even a Y.”

  “You'd have to stay in Upton for those kinds of frills,” Elly said.

  “I don't have a vehicle. I sold Honkey.”

  “Honkey?”

  “My spunky old Comet. I taught in Florida last. To liven up grammar classes I threw in slang. The students were all Island people and started calling me Honkey. I passed it on to my car. She had the strangest sneezy horn.”

  “How in the world did you get here without wheels?”

  “Let's see. From LaGuardia I took a limo to Upton and waited three hours for a half-pint MetroNorth train.”

  “Our rolling litter box. I hate taking that filthy thing. Do you move around much?”

  “Every two years.”

  “You must have been born with a heck of a restless soul!”

  “A stint in Vista hooked me fourteen years ago. I liked moving on so much I gave myself an ultimatum to keep going, to meet new people, see new sights before I got too comfortable. Before I settled for something—or someone—not quite right.”

  Was it still comfortable, she wondered, this uprooting, resettling, goodbye syndrome? No town, no woman, had even tempted her to stay once her clit stopped throbbing at the sight of them. Nothing got her up and going anymore but the kick-start of a move. All she wanted was some romance, some glamour, a strong woman extravagant in flowers, caresses, compliments—Oh, Lady Be Good! She chided herself in silent song and smiled into her coffee.

  The waitress shook her head. “I got too old for traveling about the time I started.” Like a conductor, she sang, “Last stop, Morton River! I don't know how you do it.”

  “It may be in my blood. My folks were teachers too. They could only travel summers, and then on a shoestring, but they never missed a year.”

  Elly got up with a groan. “It's time I started traveling the length of this diner again. Look! Here comes Venita Valerie now,” she said. “You can see her galloping down the hill.”

  There was a figure hurrying along Railroad Avenue toward the diner, passing a fenced lot filled with heavy equipment, an old wooden warehouse with one charred wall and a tavern too down on its luck for a neon sign, its door propped open for air conditioning.

  The woman, who looked at least seventy, was squinting toward the diner. Elly waved and pointed to Paris. Miss Valerie raised both arms in the air, then hit the heels of her hands against the sides of her hat, waving and smiling. She was so tall and had such straight, thin, stiff-looking legs she could have been on stilts. Paris hadn't expected her to be black. Under a floppy blue jacket with huge pockets she wore a silky white dress and a jaunty wide-brimmed straw hat with a red band.

  “Miss Collins?”

  She came with the smell of talcum powder like a cloud around her. Her voice was quick, whispery.

  Paris popped up.

  “My, you're slender,” said Miss Valerie.

  “Small bones, big muscles,” she joked.

  “Are you one of those lady weightlifters?” Miss Valerie asked, dropping into the booth. She lifted her hat off and fanned herself.

  Did she look like one? This really was old-fashioned Yankee territory. She worried for a moment that she wouldn't fit in here in New England. “I've worked out, but mostly to keep in shape.”

  “You won't need to here, you know. Between the hills, the budget cuts and the literacy rate we’ll run you ragged.”

  “Thanks for the warning, but I'm used to skimpy staffs and ragtag texts. It's a pleasure to meet you, Miss Valerie. Your letters were a treasure-trove of Morton River lore.”

  “Venita, my dear, Venita,” she said, offering long fingers in a ladylike handshake. They felt papery dry and warm. Venita wore no wedding ring either, just a huge amber stone in an antique gold setting. Her quiet speech never slowed, as if breathing were a waste of time. “Mr. Piccari asked me to greet you when he realized his wife's people would be descending just before the start of school and his life wouldn't be his own. He couldn't even predict if he'd be in town today at all, much less, if he could be on time, though look at me late anyway. So there, that's my apology and now let's get you to your new home. Mr. Piccari sent his youngest up to give me the key and I hope you don't mind what an awful mess I am today. I'm so disorganized and I don't want you to think ill of me so soon. Or ever!”

  Paris finished her iced tea slowly, a little worried about Venita Valerie's breathiness. She waited in vain for it to disappear.

  *

  They walked along the river past the muffled clanging of a long redbrick factory, a small wooden church with a sign in Spanish on its rough patch of grass, an American flag prominent over the door of a liquor store, an insurance office with glass brick windows, and houses half stone, half wood or covered with stained and dented aluminum siding. The slow early autumn river gave off a minty scent as if ground cover thrived in the mud.

  “You young people like swank addresses: two-two-two Railroad Aven-oo. Sounds like an old so
ng, doesn't it?” said Venita. “It'll be handy for you starting out, close enough to the diner and the pizza parlor that you won't have to cook. But here I go talking a blue streak when I don't know a thing about you.” Miss Valerie stopped short and stared at her. “Except that you're cute as a button. You could pass for under thirty, even greying so early, even behind such great big round glasses. And I don't think I've seen lashes that long in my life. They are real? Yes, of course. Come.” She started again, but stopped almost immediately, chanting. “Here. Two-two-two.”

  The building was three-storied, and newly painted a pale yellow with white trim. On the bottom floor, the Valley Pizza House had put in an arched entryway. A green neon beer sign blinked in one window. The top floors were entered from the side over a small parking lot.

  “This is the bad part of your little home,” Miss Valerie said as they turned off Railroad Avenue to a long iron stairway that led to a landing outside the top floor. “But, you see, we've always had male teachers.”

  Her heart felt like a bass drum. “Which floor?”

  “That's what I meant,” said Miss Valerie, starting slowly up. “Third.”

  Just the sight of those pitched stairs made her feel weak, shaky and slightly nauseous. Silently she calculated how many times each day she'd have to face this ordeal, move up or down this virtual fire escape. She supposed she could say no, that she'd find another apartment, but Venita had already written about the lack of affordable housing in Morton River. She could stay in the guesthouse until she bought a new Honkey, but hadn't she signed on for new experiences, people…challenges? She reminded herself of her isolation in North Dakota, fighting rattlesnakes in Montana with nothing but a hoe, the tons of impassable snow in Buffalo. She lifted her suitcases, their weight anchoring her.