Lafe stopped in mid-grab, only to feel the sting of her words, close against the back of his bald head.

"Long as I'm running this establishment I'll not tolerate worthless creatures who spend their mornings gobbling up the merchandise."

The big man turned and took a step back. "Now, now, Taylor, no need to get all ugly about this. I ain't had no breakfast yet, and my head hurts. You're only making it worse."

Taylor Henry raised herself up on tiptoe to poke a finger in his chest. "You think I care about that? I don't watch you every minute, you'll eat this place clean." She reached for an apple crate to stand on and used Lafes shirt to pull herself up. Now she could look straight into his eyes. "Know what I despise most in this world, Lafe Baskin?"

"Lordamighty, Taylor, do we have to...I hate it when you do this. Someday this store'll be mine. I'll eat all the damned pickles I want. Where's the harm in starting early?"

"Answer me, Lafe."

"All right, all right! What is it you despise?"

Taylor smiled. Usually he liked it when she smiled. Sometimes, when she didn't know he was watching, he'd catch her staring off at the mountains in the distance. That was a different kind of smile, almost sweet.

Not like this one.

He reached out as if to touch her brown hair. He liked how it turned dark red and gold of an evening when she worked on the accounts by the light of the oil lamp. How it bounced from side to side when she shook her head over something he'd done wrong. Like now.

"I despise righteous preachers,"she slapped his hand aside and poked his ribcage. "Loose women." The poking finger hit bone. "And pickle thieves."

Lafe fell backwards and landed none too daintily on the floor, then watched as Taylor jumped, light as a cat, away from the apple crate. He pulled a well-used handkerchief from the breast pocket of his vest and mopped his sweaty face.

"Dammit, woman!" He stumbled to his feet and began backing up to the front door. "Why're you so hard on me? Didn't your mama teach you to be nice to a man?"

Taylor pushed him out the door. "My mama tried, Lafe, but she never could convince me playing pretty to menfolks was worth the learning."

When she laughed, Lafe forgot all about being mad.

"What kind of a woman are you, anyway? Ought to cook and clean and raise young'uns and do right for a man no matter how worthless a son of a bitch he is." Lafe covered his mouth with his hand. "Sorry, Taylor. Forgot my language there for a minute."

He'd taken a lot of abuse before he figured it out, but he knew Taylor Henry wasn't that kind. Hadn't his father seen it the first time she walked into Baskins General Store? "Lafe," he'd said, "that's what you call a purposeful young woman. She dont know it yet, but she's got places to go, things to do. Marry up with a girl like that, and you'll have you one hell of an exciting life."

That was three years ago, not one minute of which had been dull. Couldn't be, with Taylor Henry around.

She'd walked up the dusty main street of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, in the summer of 1899, seventeen years old and fresh off a dirt farm in Richardsons Cove. Ten minutes after she pulled herself up onto the front porch of Baskins General Store, Charley Baskin offered her a job.

The arrival of the lumber industry had sent the little mountain town reeling into the new century. Baskins General Store, at the entrance to town, was a busy place from early morning to well after dark. Loggers from Maine and West Virginia and Michigan roamed the dusty aisles looking for everything from caulked boots to combs, rubbing elbows with surveyors and land speculators and all manner of local folks.

Being a well-organized girl, Taylor saw right off that Mr. Baskin wasnt getting all he might out of his store. Too many times a woman went back home without the cornmeal she needed to feed her family. How much more money might be made if the shelves were stacked with bags of Baskins Country Style Cornmeal for that mountain wife to buy?

Being a smart girl, Taylor took pencil in hand and did the figuring to show how much better Mr. Baskin could do by adding a freight run to Knoxville every week rather than every month.

And being a hard-working girl, Taylor put the store in order. Drove hard bargains for goods and collected hard money from customers. Within three months she was running the store, and within a year Charley Baskin did something unheard of in that day and age. He made an eighteen-year-old girl his manager.

She was small in stature, with a head full of brown hair that fell near to her waist. She owned three shirtsa blue one, a red one, and, for church on Sunday, a white one, her only concession to femininity. She wore long pants tucked into high lace-up pole-climber boots, as much for style as utility. She prided herself on not even owning a dress, a sentiment not shared by the church-going ladies of Gatlinburg.

From the roughneck logger to the preacher at White Oak Baptist, the men were a different matter. "Ain't she a fine girl? Old Charley Baskin got him a good'un when he hired her on. Always got a friendly smile and a kind word. Smart, too!"

"Taylor," Charley Baskin liked to say, "you're making me a rich man." He'd slip his steel-rimmed spectacles from his nose and clean them on his apron, holding them up to the fire before starting all over again. An old man's ritual that made Taylor smile.

He'd been good to her, she knew. Room and board and a regular life. Plain, maybe, but good. If she worked hard and saved her money, shed marry and have babies and grow old and fat on the prosperity the logging industry would bring to Gatlinburg. Not a bad life for the only child of country folks. Many a poor farm girl scratching corn out of East Tennessee dirt would give ten years of her life for a chance like that.

But then she'd pass by the window or walk out the front door, and there they'd be. The Great Smoky Mountains layered green and silent along the skyline. And that was when the smile Lafe liked so much would light her face.

The mountains drew Taylor to them, to their heart, like a magnet. Even when lost in work at the storecounting honey jars, stocking shelves, keeping the books, riding herd on Lafe, they were there like another, greater self living inside, filling her with wonder and comfort and dread, all at the same time.

Someday, Taylor Henry. Someday you'll leave this dusty little town behind and make your life up there. Where nothings regular. Where every day is different.

In the spring she hiked up Piney Mountain through deep virgin forests and fields of brilliant purple violets. First, a spot where she could see Mount LeConte, rising like a fortress to the south of the little town. Then east across Brushy Mountain and down into Greenbrier, to make camp at the forks where Porter Creek and Ramsey Prong become the Middle Prong of the Little Pigeon River. A loud and raucous place of icy-cold water rolling down over boulders and slick rocks into deep silent pools.

She became a frequent visitor to the hardscrabble communities that dotted the coves and hollows along the edges of the mountains. Shed drop off the mail and pass an hour or two with the folks in Fighting Creek or Goose Holler or Trinkling Springs, trading stories, passing messages from kinfolks and friends rarely seen.

Or she'd camp at the base of Goshen Lead, a long ridge that begins high on the crest and descends ten miles through a dense hardwood forest until it meets Fish Camp Prong, a stream that drains a remote high mountain valley below the state-line divide. She'd pitch her tent in a hickory grove where she could see water running down a long smooth rock face into a clear blue pool where deer came of a morning to drink. At sundown she'd tend her fire and listen to the sounds of night closing in on that strange and beautiful place so deep in the wilderness.

Even at first light she sensed she wasn't always alone out there. She was sharing her solitude with another. Maybe a wild mountain man, maybe the shade of some long-lost soul who loved this place so much even death couldnt make him leave it.

No ghost ever appeared, but the wild mountain man showed up one crisp morning in early October of 1901 while she was cooking breakfast. He stepped out of the creek and was standing in front of the campfire before she knew he was there. He was tall and lanky, wearing thick homespun pants and a dark-brown wool coat, a shapeless black hat over the fieriest red hair she'd ever seen on a man. When he nodded at the frying pan she stood up, hands on hips.

"Hungry?"

"I could eat," the stranger said.

Taylor placed two biscuits on a tin plate and ladled white gravy over them. She slid a fork onto the plate and handed it to the man. Something about him-she couldnt say what-put her on her guard.

He smiled and pulled his hat off.

"That's some head of hair you got," she said.

He sat on a rock in front of the fire and commenced to eat. "Got it from my mama. She used to cook me biscuits and gravy."

Taylor watched as he cut a wedge of biscuit with his fork, sloshed it around in the gravy, and slid it into his mouth.

"Not near as good as yours, though," he said.

She poured coffee for both of them and set the strangers cup on the ground in front of him. While she sipped hers warily she watched his eyes, soft and green like spring grass, and noting her every movement.

"Been huntin?" she said.

The stranger turned and stabbed his fork in the direction of the lush valley behind him. "Live up yonder. Seen you camp here from time to time. Thought I'd pay you a visit. Got any bacon?"

Taylor laughed. "You should've come yesterday morning. Biscuits and gravy is all that's left."

He popped the last piece in his mouth and finished the coffee. "I'm obliged for the breakfast. You want to come to my cabin now?"

Taylor raised her eyes until they met his, the soft green now flashing the color of his hair.

"I live alone," he said and smiled. "Won't be nobody to bother us."

She stared at the man and for a moment felt the power behind his eyes pulling on her normally cautious sensibilities. She shook her head slowly, eyes still locked on his, then turned and stepped into her tent. "I don't come here to socialize," she called from inside. "Get enough of that at the store where I work. Its peaceful here." When she reappeared she was carrying a double-barreled shotgun. "And it was quiet until you showed up."

"Now hold on, Miss. I didn't mean no..."

Taylor smiled and cocked both hammers. "Sure you did," she said.

Then he smiled too. "Reckon I ought to be leavin." He set the empty cup on the plate and laid them on the ground. "Up the creek four maybe five miles, look high on the east ridge. That's my place. Come for breakfast. Leave the shotgun at home."

As quickly as he had appeared, he was gone.

It was a warm afternoon in early May of 1902, and Charlie Baskin had just removed his steel-rimmed spectacles, the first step in his workdays final ritual. "We got to grow with the times," he said. "I aim to knock out the back wall and extend this store all the way to the river. We'll add another storeroom, a proper office, and a bigger loading dock on the side."

"Progress is upon us, I reckon," Taylor said.

The old man settled into a chair by the stove. "Go on and lock up, girl. Then come set with me a spell."

Taylor locked the door and sat down in the rocker next to him.

"Looks to me like another good year, Mr. Baskin."

"It is that, Taylor," he said, returning the glasses to his nose. "Progress is a good thing for us town folks. But the mountains, they'll pay the price for our good times. The way them logging crews are hauling timber out of the Smokies, why, in thirty years they'll not be a stick left standing." Off came the spectacles again. "Thank the Lord I won't see the end of it. I'll be off to Glory long before then."

"My papa used to say that. Go fetch a load of wood from the stack, little girl, fore I send you off to Glory."

Baskin looked over at her. "You know, Taylor, I knew your pa."

She sat up straight in the chair. "You never said so."

"Knew your ma, too. They was quite a pair."

"Papa left when I was only seven-no, six? Shoot, I can't remember. But I do remember them together." She reached across and touched the old mans wrinkled hand as it rubbed away invisible smudges from the lenses with his shirt tail. "It would please me if you'd put your specs back on and tell me about my father."

"How many times you seen me clean these things, girl? More'n likely I should take my old eyes out and clean them." He laid his glasses in his lap. "Very well . . . Mary Elizabeth."

"Lord, I've been found out!" she wailed. "Could there ever be a name so terrible as Mary Elizabeth Crockett Henry? Always thought it was some mean trick my folks played on me. Like they wanted to give me a name I'd hate as much as they most likely hated me."

"George and Loretta didn't hate you. Didn't hate each other, neither." The lines in his face softened in the glow from the wood stove. "They was just wrong for each other, is all. That ain't a crime, you know."

He leaned forward and reached for the kettle still warming on the stove. "Have you a cup of tea. It'll warm your bones. How'd you get the name you go by, anyhow?"

"After Papa left, Mama married up with a clerk in the Sevier County Courthouse name of Frank Taylor. Franks a good man. Patient, easy-going." She smiled. "In the time it took for my mama to say "I do" I became Mary Elizabeth Crockett Henry Taylor. I wasn't about to call myself Mary Elizabeth, and I gave up on the Crockett part straight off. That left Henry Taylor. Sure couldn't wear that one. So I settled on Taylor Henry."

"Where's your pa now, Taylor?"

"Last I heard he was in the Oklahoma Territory." She held the warm cup with both hands close to her chest. "At least that's where he was ten years ago"

She gazed into the fire, searched the shadows within the flames.

"I found an old box in the barn four, five years after he left. Don't know who hid it there, Mama maybe, or more likely Frank. Inside was a book, The Last of The Mohicans, and a few faded pictures of Mama and Papa in what appeared to be happier times, a packet of his old letters to me. Must have been two or three years worth held together with a red ribbon." She raised the cup to her lips, took a long sip, and smiled. "Wasn't much about him in the letters. They were mostly about me. How was I doing? I must be gettin big. Maybe someday I could come visit him out west. He missed me. Things like that."

"I'll bet George did miss you, child."

"Maybe so," Taylor said, then turned and stared at the old man. "But he never did anything about it, did he?"

"George Henry was a proud man, child. Don't blame him for runnin off on your mama."

"I don't blame him for nothin. He just could have done better is all."

She leaned forward and set the cup on the stove, then settled back in the chair.

"You reckon he found what he was lookin for?"she said.

"Why, I dont rightly know, Taylor." He raised a hand to his spectacles, then smiled and settled them back on his nose again. "Hard enough to figure out what that thing is much less find it. What do you think he was lookin for?"

Taylor shook her head slowly. "I don't know. Freedom, maybe? A simpler life? Whatever it was, I hope he found it."

The old man hitched his pants up and crossed a bony ankle over the other knee. "You know how they met?"

Taylor shook her head.

"It was when he was teaching in that little schoolhouse over near Maryville where Sam Houston used to teach. You know, I always thought your pa favored old Sam a bit." He bent his finger over the rim of his glasses and pointed at his eye. "They both had that far-off look.

"You know, I never did understand why George Henry and Loretta Crockett ever got together. Them two was as different as water and dirt." He laughed. "And stubborn? Law me!"

Taylor saw them in the two-room log cabin theyd built the year after she was born. Fighting, then trying their best to be what they thought the other wantedonly to fight again. Her mother had once said Taylors father was like a tree. So rooted in his rights and wrongs. The way Taylor saw it, she couldn't change him, so she cut him down.

"I remember how she was," Taylor said after a moment. "I remember him, too. How he loved to sing. And his wonderful tall tales. He could always make me laugh."

She pushed herself out of the rocking chair and walked to the front window. The full moon hung low over the little mountain town. An owl fluttered across its bright face, hunting supper. A wagonload of loggers passed by.

She turned back to the fire and the old man stirring her memories. "One hot summer morning he kissed me goodbye, walked out the door, and never came back," she said.

Charley smiled. "And here you are."

"And here I am."

"On balance it kind of worked out for everybody, now, didn't it?" He noticed her wet eyes. "Well, maybe not everybody."

The fire crackled and flared up, shooing her ghosts from the room. Charley cleared his throat. "Look out that window again, Taylor. Tell me what you see."

The main street was empty now, the moon so bright she had to squint to see stars.

"LeConte." She nodded to the great mountain. "I can make out the valley shadows on the slope." She looked back over her shoulder. "Want to see?"

"Ain't a day or a night goes by I don't look at that mountain. Near seventy years I been looking at it. Course, when I was young I used to go up there. All the way up. See forever from the top of Smoky." He walked over to where she stood at the window and pointed a crooked finger at the round bump in the center of the mountaintop. "It's a different world up there. Easier in some ways, harder in others. I expect you understand."

Taylor nodded.

"Now, my boy Lafe, mountain would of done him good when he was a young' un. Too late now. He's doomed to live out his days in this store." He cocked his head. "You wouldn't consider marrying up with Lafe, would you, girl? You know he feels real strong for you. Store'd be yours then. Hell's fire, might as well be yours now. You're the only one knows how to run it."

"I can't marry Lafe, Mr. Baskin," she said softly. "You been good to me, and I hope you take no offense, but I just couldn't do that." A great smile spread across her face. "I'd kill him in a week."

"Reckon you would, at that." He sat down with a grin. "I reckon you would."

Taylor sat back in the rocker and stared at the fire, waiting for the words she needed. This sweet old man had taken her in, given her work and a place to live and all the wisdom of his years. She'd been happy here. Three years happy. Just nowhere near enough for a lifetime.

"You all right, Taylor? You studyin about your mama and daddy again?"

She knelt down in front of him, took his two rough hands in hers. "You might well be the kindest old codger I'll ever meet in this life. Things you've given me I couldn't never repay, not in ten lifetimes." She nodded toward the window. "But every day when I sweep the dust out of here I look off in the distance and there's the high mountains, and every day they call to me, louder of late. I'm thinking it might be time to go."

Charley turned his big hands and wrapped them tight around her wrists, holding them up in front of her face. "You come here with nothin but these hands, girl, and a desire to better yourself. Looky here, I've watched you grow from a backwoods farm girl with hungry eyes into that full-of-purpose woman I always knew you'd be."

He loosened his grip and gently let go.

"Mountain's a truth mirror, girl. It'll show you what you really are."

With that, the old man rocked forward and walked slowly to the front door. He stood there for a time, then nodded his head toward the high mountains.

"Up there you take life for what it is, not what you want it to be. Or what you think it ought to be."

He stepped back from the doorway, his face just a shadow in the narrow space between where she was now and where shed be going.

"Follow your destiny, Mary Elizabeth."