Smoky Mist

He loved it. This was his home. His family had lived here for generations. Carter knew all the stories. It was sad to think he was the last of the Thompson clan. Arriving in America from Ireland in the early 1920’s, his great grandfather and his younger brother came to the Townsend Valley in Tennessee to work in the lumber yards. The two men worked for three seasons cutting down and processing the trees for shipment all across America. Carter’s great grandfather actually worked in the saw mill in town, while his brother worked on the mountain. He was athletic and somewhat of a loner, perfect for the solitary life lumberjacks lived. There wasn’t much information about the man accept what Carter had discovered in the Railroad Museum in town.

Carter volunteered at the Little River Railroad/Lumber Museum in Townsend to keep the history alive. He was named after his great grandfather’s brother. That’s where his first name, George, came from. He liked Carter better so that’s the name he went by. Still, there was much he wished he knew about George. After a train accident left his left arm and leg broken, he moved high up into the mountains away from any civilization. He took his setoff house to live in while he built a cabin nearby. It was years before he finished the cabin. Carter owned it now but didn’t live there year round. There was no paved road and no electric. He was truly roughing it when he went there. Fortunately, George had planned the location well. There were plenty of trees to keep the area shaded and an off shoot of the Little Pigeon flowed nearby, providing clean water year round.

Carter continued to walk until he came to his favorite thinking spot. He stretched out leaning his back against one of the few remaining indigenous trees. It was nearly thirty feet tall. There was a cool breeze blowing under its shady leaves. Few tourists knew that most of the forestry was harvested in the late 1920’s and what they saw now was second generation replanted trees. At the museum, they could see pictures of those majestic trees that had once stood hundreds of feet in the air. Some with a girth that a dozen men with outstretched hands could circle around.

There was a part of him that longed to live back then. Life was simpler. People were simpler. No rushing madness or jobs in office buildings with windows you couldn’t open. Carter had hated working in those buildings. Fresh out of college, he really thought being an accountant was the way he wanted to go. Life in Atlanta had been stifling. And, another part of him knew things were no easier for gay men back then. They were solitary figures living a lonely existence. At least today if the right man ever came along, he did have the opportunity to settle down, raise a family… live. Like that was going to happen while he hid away in these mountains.

Carter laughed at his inner drama queen. He’d been to the clubs in Knoxville and Atlanta. Sometimes the need to touch and be touched out weighed everything else, but there had never been anyone who had struck a deep cord in him. He’d even tried dating women. That had been another huge mistake. So, when his grandpa passed away and left him George’s cabin and the land it sat on, along with more money than he could ever spend, he came home.

He bought an old restaurant on the main road leading into Townsend. Spent a year remodeling and redecorating the building. Made it into the kind of place he would love to hang out in. The Train Stop Bar and Grill opened with a quiet crowd in the fall last year. Tonight, they would have people standing outside, sometimes waiting an hour, just to get a table. He didn’t advertise. Didn’t even have a web page. He meant it to be a local place and if anyone knew about it, it was because someone told them about it. Word of mouth was the best kind of advertisement as far as Carter was concerned. The Train Stop was his baby and it would never be a tourist spot, which was just fine with Carter.

The longer he sat there, the more his mind drifted. Mr. Pillar had contacted him about finding another engine part in a remote section of the Tredown Camp area. He’d go check it out tomorrow. There’d been an email from Mark Winslow that he should answer. The guy was nice enough and the night they’d spent together had been good, but Carter just didn’t think it could become anything more than it was. Then, he remembered that damned letter was still sitting on his desk at the museum. He refused to give it any of his free time today. A framed photo flashed briefly across his mind.

The picture hung at the museum. It was dated September 1923. Two men stood side by side in front of a train car loaded down with thirty foot logs. The older of the two, the more grizzled one, had his arm draped across the other younger man. He glanced up at the older man with fondness in his eyes. Even in the old and faded photo is was clear to see. How had they gotten away with that, Carter wondered. They were more than friends. He knew that they had lived together in the setoff house during the days when the camp was at it’s busiest. Could they have been lovers?

The older man was George Thompson, Carter’s great, great uncle. His grandpa had told him that he remembered George and Carter looked just like him. It was hard to tell with the bushy beard that covered his lower face. He also wore a wide brimmed hat covering the top of his head. There were no pictures of him without the beard. Something else his grandfather had said floated through his sleepy mind.

“We never found his journals. Your dad and I searched the setoff house and the cabin but never found them. My pa was sure he kept journals and thought they would make a good book about the times.”

If George had kept journals, Carter wondered where they could have been hidden and why. His eyes closed and he thought of the picture hanging in the museum again.

The younger man was Jackson Douglas, sometimes referred to as Jesse. There was little information known about him, accept for the fact that he died in a train accident. He married a girl named Rose who lived on a farm close to Maryville. When he died, she was carrying his unborn child that he never saw.

Carter closed his eyes and drifted off to the sounds of the forest that surrounded him. He had time for a nap before he had to be back at the bar.