Chapter 3

It must have been almost five years later that I saw Misty again what with her being on the run. I knew for a fact that she knew a lot more than she was willing to discuss with anyone including me.

I was up to the cabin to seek out some white lightning for a party down in the valley on that good bottom land that us mountain folk dream about but seldom get to work.

I was doing it for a friend of a friend and was surprised to see my Misty a sitting by the fireplace with her hair flowing all around her like a shroud from the Bible days.

She looked at me and I saw that she was suffering from some loss of vision in both of her eyes. Still, she could still see, and she recognized me straight away like we were twin creatures from some lost stretch of land that didn’t exist any longer.

There was a passel of young’uns round her legs, and I picked out our daughter right away from the way she looked right at me and through me seeing all my faults and my sins like an open book.

She looked at her mama and Misty nodded her head to her unspoken question which didn’t mystify me much knowing what was uppermost on her mind. I could almost hear her brain working as she figured out my claim to fame in her mama’s past. She was tiny and immature, but I knew she got the picture without much difficulty.

Misty was spouting some yarn about a widow lady and we all was smiling because we knew she was talking about the widow Mollie Hatfield up on Lookout Mountain. Most of our folks didn’t take to the Hatfield’s that much and that included the infamous Mollie Hatfield.

I knew for a fact that pretty much all my kin thought the Hatfield bunch was a bunch of backshooting varmints talking out of both sides of their mouths like the government agents that promised you the moon and gave you a bunch of crap.

My five year old daughter had white hair just like her mama and long legs that gave promise of her being taller than most girls when she was full grown.

They called her Jade.

I opined that it was probably because of her deep green eyes that you only see usually on a cat. Even at five years of age, she had that feminine quality that made most females envious and most males curious about what she was thinking deep inside.

Now, most of those good old boys up at the cabin were carrying weapons and I felt mighty strange not being heeled and all. Still, I was sort of relaxed knowing I was kin to most of them and not a stranger by any means.

Misty invited me over to her side with her crooked finger and patting the empty bench beside her with a firm pat. I knew that mystified most of the folks because they didn’t know we were acquainted that well.

Little Jade wandered over and hopped up on my lap straddling my leg with her sturdy backside. She grabbed hold of my hand and put it on her waist coyly smiling up into my suddenly nervous eyes. I purely didn’t want to be put down any mountain folk’s book as being one of those kiddie chasers that took advantage of the young’uns before they had even reached the age of reason.

Misty leaned down and kissed her cheek like a loving mom.

Everyone relaxed seeing her acceptance of me as a blood relative and I breathed a sigh of relief knowing that those good old boys had their itchy fingers off their triggers.

At this point in time, Misty looked like a girl in her late twenties, but her actual age was pushing late fifties.

She invited me into her bed that night and I was wise enough to accept gracefully and did my best to keep up with her in matters of carnal activity. I knew little Jade was pretending to be asleep in the corner, but it didn’t impede my libido from consummating our mating in the dark.

I went back to the town with a successful mission concluded and heard almost a decade later that my Misty was in the jail over at the county seat arrested for a whole bunch of crimes that made no sense to me at all. She was in her mid-sixties at that time and she was starting to look her age more and more each day.

Jade came to me in my bachelor pad and threw her backpack on the spare bed without speaking a single word. I knew she had been told by her mother to come to me in just such a circumstance and I simply gave her sheets and a blanket and set out dinner for two that night.

I have to relate to you folks that Jade was a vision of absolute feminine perfection at her budding age of sixteen.

I assumed her mama had raised her right and she was still a virgin at least in her feminine core. I was not as certain about her mouth or her backside which were usually the first entrances to go with the mountain girls raised in almost complete isolation from the outside world.

She knew she had nothing to fear from me and would walk around inside my tiny cabin in her altogether and would take her baths right in the metal tub set up next to the sink in the kitchen. She allowed me to scrub her back and dry her off knowing I was her daddy and would not to anything untoward without her full permission.