The governor of West Virginia could not shake the image of the young convict’s eyes. During a routine visit to the state penitentiary, John Hullbrook had watched a prisoner being dragged back to his cell after a beating, sullen and defiant. When the governor asked what the trouble was, the man snarled that it was none of his business, even after a guard warned him he was speaking to the governor. Unmoved, the prisoner declared he expected nothing from anyone and was taken away behind a clanging iron door.
Curious, Hullbrook asked the guard who the man was. His name was Jim Smith, a lifer from Greenbrier County who had killed his father, or so the records said. The jury had spared him the noose only because the old man he shot had been a feared and violent brute. But the governor could not stop thinking about those eyes.
They stirred something buried deep in his memory, visions of an apple tree in bloom and a face from his youth in the hills of East Tennessee. Later that evening, alone in his office after the staff had gone home, the governor heard a timid knock. A frail old woman in a rusty dress entered, apologizing that she had tried for three days to see him. In the dim light, her face triggered the same vision of apple blossoms, and he invited her in.
She presented a petition for the pardon of Jim Smith, the same man he had seen that afternoon. The governor doubted the petition, noting that few names supported it and that Smith’s reputation was poor. The woman then revealed a stunning truth. The man Jim killed was not his father, but his stepfather, and Jim had confessed to the crime to protect her.
She admitted that she had fired the shot herself, snatching a pistol in desperation while the drunken man beat her. Her son came home, saw what she had done, and took the blame, threatening to kill himself if she ever spoke the truth. With no money for a lawyer, she had held her silence. Then came the revelation that explained the governor’s haunting memories.
Before the war, when she was a girl in Tennessee, she had a sweetheart named John, a poor farm boy who went off to fight and promised to return. They sat together under an apple tree on the night he left, and he told her she had the most beautiful eyes he had ever seen. He never came back. That winter she gave birth to Jim, and later she married the brutal man she eventually shot.
As she spoke, the governor understood why those eyes haunted him. He was that boy, John. The woman believed he died in the war, and he had lived his life never knowing what had become of her. Now, powerless in his own office, he stared at the woman who had loved him in another life and the son he never knew he had.
He said nothing of his identity. Instead, he granted her request. He handed her several hundred dollars and told her to present herself at the prison the next day at noon, where her son would be pardoned on the condition that both leave West Virginia immediately. He told her he did this for the sake of her dead John, and asked that she not return to thank him.
As she left, overwhelmed with joy, the governor leaned forward and buried his head in his arms on his desk, taking small comfort only in the fact that she believed him dead. The second story concerns three sisters whose births astonished a mountain community. On a farm high on Sugarloaf Mountain in Edneyville, North Carolina, Thomas Edward Justice, known to all as Big Tom, was plowing with his mule Earl when his eldest son ran across the field to announce that a baby girl had been born. The farmer nodded and kept working.
Thirty minutes later, his son returned with news of another girl. Soon after came word of a third. Big Tom dropped his plow and ran to the cabin, and the family that already included seven boys and four girls now counted seven girls in all, with the arrival of triplets. Word spread quickly through the mountain coves.
Relatives and neighbors came to see the girls, and an uncle suggested the rhyming names Essie, Bessie, and Desessie. Raised as inseparable, the sisters wore identical clothes made by their mother and became local celebrities, winning baby contests and drawing crowds wherever they went. They worked beside their siblings in the fields and attended the one-room schoolhouse, where classmates nicknamed them Boots, Shoes, and Leggings. In winter they fought epic ice battles along the road to school, while each Sunday they sang in the church choir.
By 1920, all three were married at seventeen. They lived long lives, raised large families, ran successful businesses, and celebrated birthdays that drew attention across the country, even earning a note from President Ronald Reagan. Dessie died in 1986 at eighty-two, Bessie in 1988 at eighty-four, and Essie in 1998 at ninety-three. Another story unfolds in the hills below Pickles Gap, where a teenage girl named Annie hung laundry while her brother Rex sat whittling and mocking her for working so hard.
Annie resented her life, laboring without any chance for pretty things. She confessed that she had never owned a new dress, only worn hand-me-downs in brown calico, chosen because it was cheap and hid dirt. The color she hated most was brown. The one thing she craved in the world was a pink dress, like the one worn by a beautiful summer visitor she had seen at the hotel.
Her mother reminded her that the family could not afford new clothes, promising instead to fix up an old blue dress for the church decoration day. When the summer visitor, Miss Allen, stopped by the cabin, she offered Annie a dollar for gathering honeysuckle, but her mother refused to accept pay for wildflowers. Miss Allen offered instead a small dress that her little sister had outgrown, and the mother reluctantly allowed Annie to accept it. Annie could barely contain her excitement, desperately hoping the dress would be pink.
After Miss Allen left, Annie opened the package. Inside was a plain brown linen school dress, not pink, with a small hole that her mother promised to patch. Heartbroken, Annie sat sobbing into the crumpled dress. Her brother, who had spent the whole afternoon mocking her, suddenly offered to chase the cows for her, quietly forgetting that doing so was, by his own reckoning, no man’s job.
A fourth story begins with a piece of fine English pottery. A blue willow-pattern platter made by Josiah Spode had been passed down through generations and was the most treasured heirloom of John Hendricks, a farmer in Maggie Valley, North Carolina. When the platter vanished from its booth at the county fair, his wife Lucy was alarmed, especially since the platter was meant to be a wedding gift for their son James. The fair booth had been watched by their neighbor, Serena Simmerly, and Lucy could not shake her suspicion that carelessness, or something worse, explained the loss.
Soon James became engaged to Serena’s daughter Flo, but the missing platter poisoned everything. Lucy, anxious about her husband’s reaction, muttered an insinuation that Serena knew where it was. James repeated the remark to Flo, who was deeply offended. The engagement collapsed, the ring was returned by mail, and the pasture path between the two farms grew over.
Both young people grieved in silence, and both mothers suffered watching them. Lucy quietly bought a nearly identical Spode platter from an antique shop, complete with a small nick to match the original. Serena, convinced she was responsible for the loss, bought another identical plate as a confession gift and tearfully admitted to taking it, though the accusation was false. The two women reconciled and returned to their old friendship, and James and Flo were persuaded back together.
The wedding took place after Christmas. At the wedding dinner, the hostess glanced at the table and saw both identical platters on display, one at each end. Roxy, the longtime cook, had found the hidden duplicate in the linen closet. Before Lucy could recover, her husband rose and presented a wrapped package to the newlyweds, revealing his great-grandmother’s original platter, which he had secretly hidden in an attic trunk for safekeeping after the fair, fearing it might be lost again.
The entire tragedy, the bad feelings, the broken engagement, had been caused by his own secret. The two mothers exchanged a single glance and chose to laugh, and the guests joined in, uncertain of the joke but glad for the joy of the day. All was well in Maggie Valley again. A fifth story concerns a young man named Samuel Mullins from Shepherd’s Gap, Tennessee.
Sam worked the hay fields until dark, but every Wednesday he walked a mile to the white steps of the old Harmony Baptist Church, where Doris Jenkins waited for him. Sam was an orphan, Doris had a difficult home life, and the two shared a deep affection and a shared dream. Sam longed to reopen the church, closed for years since the death of his grandfather, a beloved preacher. Doris encouraged him constantly, insisting they would succeed together.
With little money saved, Sam traveled to Knoxville, where he boldly interrupted a faculty meeting at a theological seminary. He poured out his story and his faith, and the president, moved by the young man’s sincerity, granted him shelter and a place to study. Back home, the community buzzed with excitement, and local women prepared Doris for life as a preacher’s wife. When Sam was asked to preach at the old church that summer, he hesitated, doubting his ability, but Doris convinced him he was ready.
On a Sunday in late August, the church filled to overflowing. Doris sat alone on the front bench in the white dress the women had made for her wedding. Sam preached a simple sermon of God’s love, and the old spirit of the church returned once more. The doors of Harmony Baptist Church were open again.
A sixth story tells of a deputy sheriff named Amos who spent two days tracking a wanted outlaw through the wilds of the mountains. Hungry and exhausted, he entered a cave where he found cans filled with gunpowder and shot instead of food. The cave’s owner appeared, a tall man with a large frame, an injured hand, and a rifle in his arm. Despite having the man in his grasp, Amos could not bring himself to arrest him.
He bandaged the wound instead, and the two men shared supper like brothers, with Amos speaking freely of his sweetheart Katie and his hopes of buying a farm with the reward money. Days passed as the outlaw, who gave only the name Otis, taught Amos to hunt and the two grew close. The handcuffs lay hidden under Amos’s bed, growing heavier on his conscience. Finally, Otis revealed that he knew Amos was a lawman.
He explained that he had been tricked by a court clerk who stole his farm through a fraudulent signature, and he shot the clerk in a rage. He offered himself as a prisoner, telling Amos to collect the reward and go marry Katie. Amos could not do it. He left the cave empty-handed, certain that some debts were too heavy to collect.
The final story follows Penelope Wilson, a teacher at the Little Mountain School in Dry Cove, East Tennessee, who quickly learned that her pupils were nearly all descendants of Grandpa Hap Tadlock, whose word ruled the valley. Among them was little Don Tadlock, an eight-year-old with twisted legs who could never walk. Penelope befriended the boy and insisted that a city doctor might cure him, but Grandpa Tadlock refused to allow it, declaring that the boy’s condition was God’s will and could not be changed. Penelope wrote secretly to a specialist and received an encouraging reply.
She devised a plan, telling Grandpa Tadlock that a Methodist preacher was heading to the North Carolina community where his son Davey lived, and suggesting the grandfather should go there to protect his son from the rival faith. Worried for Davey’s soul, the old man left immediately with his wife, planning to stay until corn planting time. With the grandfather gone, Penelope asked Don himself what he wanted, and the boy said he wished his legs could be fixed. His parents agreed, and the child was taken to a specialist in the city.
When Grandpa Tadlock returned, he brought a gift he thought his grandson would need, a shining new wheelchair. But the boy met him with a different surprise. Don came walking down the steps with only a slight limp, stronger every day. The old man was stunned.
His granddaughter insisted that “what is to be will be,” and Miss Penny Lope had said the same. The grandfather took a plug of tobacco, bit off a chew, and allowed that he and the teacher had been right after all. He suggested they trade the wheelchair in for a bicycle.