I suppose every small town has a Crazy Emma, and Buck Lick, Tennessee is no exception. Emma Jean doesn't actually live in Buck Lick. She lives in her daddy's farmhouse about a mile from town out on Lee's Creek Road. That's where she grew up and when her Mama and Daddy passed on, she stayed there.
Now, when I say Crazy Emma, I don't mean she's like the people who live at the Handkersen Home over in Jackson and draw pictures with color crayons and have milk and cookies at three o'clock every day. No, Crazy Emma isn't really crazy. She's just a little different...well...a lot different than most folks in Buck Lick.
She didn't used to be that way. I remember when she was in high school. She was about like any other teenage girl in Buck Lick. She wore dresses to school, got good grades, and not even once was she ever caught in a car with a boy out where Dune Road ends at Dune Creek. I know, because every Saturday night one of my deputies drives out there about ten to see if there's anything going on. He does that because I know what goes on out there. I used to take Jackie, now my wife, out there for a little huggin' and kissin' and anything else I could get away with, and I figure I'm doing the parents in town a favor by keeping the clothes on their daughters.
Now, it's probable Emma Jean never went out to Dune Road because nobody asked her to, because Emma Jean wasn't the ripest peach on the tree. I mean, she didn't have buck teeth or warts or anything like that, but she was just kind of plain and she hadn't started to sprout yet, so to speak.
Emma Jean wasn't Crazy Emma then. She was just Emma Jean Robertson when she graduated from high school. Like some of the girls in Buck Lick, Emma Jean had a desire to be more than a housewife, so she applied at the Rachael Harrington College of Beauty and Health over in Jackson. When she got accepted, she up and moved to Jackson and stayed with her Aunt Florence.
She spent two years at the college and I guess when she graduated, she thought she'd come back to Buck Lick and start a beauty parlor in Buck Lick. When she came back to visit her folks, she found out Sara June Jacobs had already started one. Emma Jean didn't think Buck Lick could support two beauty parlors, so she went back to Jackson and enrolled in the Spa Management course at the same college. She figured she'd open up a women's spa in Buck Lick where women could come get different kinds of massages and steam themselves in a sauna.
Anyway, Emma Jean kept living with her Aunt Florence, and that changed her a lot.
The way I heard the story from Jackie, who heard it down at Sara's Beauty Parlor from Sara June, is that Emma Jean's Aunt Florence was really good at art in high school and a little wild. When she graduated, she joined up with a group of hippies that started a commune over in the Smokies back when it was cool to live with a dozen or so other people and raise chickens and goats and have sex with everybody in the commune. Sara heard the story from her cousin Tulla Mae who went to school with Florence and said Florence was always a nice girl but was a little different.
After a couple years, the commune didn't work out, so they split up and went their separate ways. Florence's separate way was to move to an old farmhouse outside of Jackson and keep raising chickens and goats and selling eggs and goat milk. She also started painting pictures of places in Tennessee and she started up a little shop where she sold those pictures to tourists who came to see the Casey Jones Museum.
Emma Jean went to school during the week but she had her weekends free, so she'd go with her Aunt Florence to find places to paint pictures of. Most of those places were out in the woods or by a river where nobody ever went unless they were deer hunting or night-fishing for catfish.
From what Jackie told me, Emma Jean's Aunt Florence liked to be what she called "free in spirit" when she painted. I guess being free in spirit meant being free of clothes, because Sara said that's how Emma Jean's Aunt Florence always got before she started painting. She'd just walk out beside a creek or a river with her easel and canvas and paints, strip down to her birthday suit, and then start painting.
Well, Emma Jean's mama and daddy both passed away while she was at spa management school and she inherited the farm. When she graduated from spa management school, she moved into the farmhouse and got herself some chickens and goats and planted a big garden just like her Aunt Florence. Then she started looking for a place to start giving massages in Buck Lick.
Now, I have to say that the first change I noticed in Emma Jean was that she'd not just sprouted over the four years she'd been in Jackson. That girl had gone from a beanpole to big breasts and a really sexy ass. Her breasts didn't look as big as Jackie's and her ass wasn't as wide, but Jackie's had two kids and having kids will make most women get bigger in some places. Jackie got bigger than some women do, and I really like the places where Jackie got bigger. Still, Emma Jean was enough to make you turn your head and wonder what she looked like under those tight T-shirts and jeans.
I didn't see the second change until the first of July when I was filling up my sheriff's car down at Willard's Gas Station and Bait Shop. When I pulled in to a pump, there was Joe Bob Riley in his pickup and he had a tree stand with a takedown ladder in the bed.
Now, tree stands are pretty common around Buck Lick. What they are is a platform that you put up in a tree to sit on while you hunt deer. Deer don't usually look up, so they'll walk right past you and give you a good shot. I have one I use every fall. It was just odd that Joe Bob would have his in his truck in July. Most hunters don't put them up until maybe the middle of August because the first deer season, archery season, doesn't start until the last week of August.
I said "Hey" to Joe Bob and then asked him where he was going with his tree stand. He grinned.
"Oh, I'm just gonna do me a little scoutin' before the season starts."
Well, that was even odder. Joe Bob always hunts on his own place and wouldn't be taking his tree stand anywhere.
"You're not gonna hunt your own crick bottom this season?"
Joe Bob grinned again.
"Well, I ain't really scoutin' my place. I'm scoutin' out at Jimmy Rae's place, down by Lee's Creek. He says he's got a lot to see there. Chargin' five dollars to set up a tree stand. Well, I wanna get there before all the places are gone, so I better be goin'. You have a great Fourth, Sheriff."
That made no sense at all. Half the county was good deer hunting land so nobody would pay to set up a tree stand when there were so many good spots you didn't have to pay for. I decided to drive out to Jimmy Rae's farm to see what was going on.
There were ten pickups parked in Jimmy Rae's barn lot when I got there, and I couldn't find Jimmy Rae anywhere. There was a place in his pasture where it looked like the grass had been mashed flat into a sort of trail, so I started following it. About a quarter of a mile from the house, I walked into the woods that border Lee's Creek, and about twenty feet from the creek, I counted nine tree stands with men sitting in them. Joe Bob was just putting up his takedown ladder when I walked up and tapped him on the shoulder.
"Joe Bob, what's the deal here? Nobody would put their tree stand closer than a hundred yards to another tree stand. There's so many of you guys here no deer'll come within ten miles of this place."
Joe Bob sort of chuckled.
"Help me get my ladder and stand up and you can see for yourself."
After we got Joe Bob's ladder and stand up, he handed me a pair of binoculars.
"Climb up and have a look across the crick."
I climbed up the ladder and sat myself down in the tree stand and then looked across Lee's Creek. What I was looking at was Emma Jean's house and back yard. Even though it was quite a ways away, I could see Emma Jean out working in her garden. Evidently, Emma Jean had decided being "free in spirit" was a good way to garden too, because she was as naked as the day she was born except a lot bigger. Some of her places were a lot bigger than others.
Now, it didn't look to me like Emma Jean was doing anything illegal, but since I'm the law enforcement for the county, it was my duty to fully investigate the situation to make sure. I put the binoculars to my eyes and then turned the little knob to focus them better.
Well, the first thing that was obvious was that I'd underestimated the size of Emma Jean's breasts. Of course, she was on her hands and knees coming toward me and weeding her green beans at the time, and her breasts were hanging down and wobbling all over the place, so they might have seemed bigger than they really were. I couldn't really see her ass very well until she got to the end of that row and turned around. Yep, Emma Jean had blossomed out real nice there too.
Her ass cheeks were nice and round and looked pretty tight to me. Where those cheeks met her thighs, the made a little diamond shape, and I couldn't see that very well until she moved down the row. What was in that little diamond was a pair of really puffy lips edged with dark brown hair. Jackie has hair on her lips too, so I got this little twinge in my underwear.
About then, Joe Bob climbed up the ladder and tapped me on the shoulder.
"Sheriff, you gonna be done soon? You're taking up my lookin' time."
Well, I changed places with Joe Bob and then went back to town. As far as I could tell, Emma Jean was just exercising her rights and about everything else she had on her own property. Joe Bob and the other guys were just exercising their rights to be able to sit in a tree stand. There was nothing illegal about looking for deer across the creek. It wasn't their fault that what they were seeing was a little dear with a bare behind.
When I got home that night. I didn't tell Jackie everything I'd seen from that tree stand. I just told her I'd seen Emma Jean walking down the street and she looked like she'd filled out some. Jackie seemed to be pretty interested, but then, Jackie's always interested in how other women look. She's had this fantasy...
