Mayfly Melodies

Twenty-Three

Bailey

If you talk bad about country music, it's like saying bad things about my momma. Them's fightin' words—Dolly Parton

"What do you think of that girl? Caroline?"

Bailey looked up from her songwriting book to see Stephen staring at her. She was sitting atop the feed bin in the barn, one foot hanging off the edge and the other tucked neatly beneath her. Her hair was hanging down around her face in loose curls and she brushed them away absently as she raised an eyebrow at Stephen.

He was standing a few feet away, leaning against the pitchfork that he was using to muck out stalls. Travis had been helping him and had gone to dump out the wheelbarrow, giving Stephen a short respite before the work began once more. He brushed the sweat off of his brow and regarded her evenly with a green-eyed stare.

"What are you asking about her for?" Bailey asked.

Stephen shrugged. "No reason. Just ran into her a few days ago when you were at the rodeo."

"In the forest?"

"Yeah. She was writing some music. She show you any of it?"

Bailey nodded. "Yeah.  I saw her this morning.  We talked about one of them and I'm going to record it and put it up on my YouTube channel. Haven't used it in a couple of years. I figure now is probably the best time to get back into it."

"Which song?  The 'Back Home' one?"

"How'd you know?"

Stephen shrugged nonchalantly.  "She showed me it when I was chatting with her.  Seemed good as far as I could tell. A little dark and edgy, different, but cool."

"It's not my usual sound," Bailey mused, "but the whole point of this break is to find myself again, what kind of music I want to sing.  I don't want to rush back into the Nashville scene.  Heck, I don't know if I'll ever even go back there.  I just want to sing something that is more than a catchy verse that people will forget after a couple of weeks.  You know?"

Stephen nodded even though the whole concept of writing music went over his head.  "I get it.  You think Caroline can write music like that?"

"I think she's on the right track.  I haven't heard a song like the one she wrote in a long time.  It needs a bit of fine-tuning, a few chord changes and small lyric changes, but it was good.  I didn't realize she'd gotten so advanced so quickly.  It's only been a few weeks."

"You must be a good teacher."

"I think she's just naturally talented at this stuff," Bailey confessed.  "She's picking it up way faster than I did. And I had Grandma Cam as my mentor.  She was the best teacher around."  She smiled fondly at the memory of her grandmother and went back to her music.

But Stephen wasn't done. "You know...I noticed she doesn't talk. Like at all. You told me before when I ran into the two of you that one time that she didn't talk much but I figured she was just shy. I didn't think that she'd need a pen and paper to communicate."

It was the last thing Bailey wanted to talk about. After all, it wasn't really her story to tell. As it were, she didn't even know the whole story. She just knew that Caroline had stopped talking the year before and that Noah thought she was slowly getting better. If this were true, Bailey didn't know but she hoped for his sake that she was.

"It seems to work for her just fine," Bailey answered. She scribbled another few notes down on her page and then reconsidered and paused to erase them.