Sweetgum Puck
Stray Stories
There’s a holler past Devil’s Elbow where the mist clings low and thick, and the redbuds grow crooked like they’re shy of the sun. Folks in those parts say not to go courtin’ down there, not unless you want your heart tangled up like barbed wire in a blackberry patch. It’s Puck’s place, they say. And he ain’t the Shakespeare kind.
No, this one’s Ozark born, bark-skinned and sweetgum-eyed, with a grin like a cracked persimmon and a laugh that rustles through the pine needles. They call him Sweetgum Puck. Mischievous as a coon in a henhouse, and ten times more meddlesome.
He don’t mean no harm, see. He just loves love. Reckons the world’s gone cold and dry, and it’s his job to kindle the kind of fire that makes folks do dumb, pretty things. Only problem is, Puck’s got no sense for who ought to love who. Or when. Or why.
Take what happened with Miss Effie Coulter and Pastor Ray.
Effie was near sixty, ran the post office and made the best poke sallet you ever tasted. She’d never married—not for lack of suitors, but on account of being sharp as a fishhook and twice as quick. Pastor Ray was a widower, serious as a sermon on sin, and didn’t much care for Effie’s jokes about the devil needing a secretary.
But Puck, bless his fluttery heart, saw them both alone one spring evening and decided it was destiny.
He slipped into town on a wind that smelled of sassafras and sass, plucked a handful of blooming red clover, and crushed it into a love charm slick with honey and possumwood sap. He tucked it into Pastor Ray’s coat pocket, humming a fiddle-tune that hadn’t been played in a hundred years.
The next morning, Pastor Ray marched into the post office and kissed Effie square on the mouth.
She slapped him so hard the charm fell out of his pocket and sprouted roots right there on the floor.
They’ve been avoiding each other ever since.
Then there was that business with the McCall twins.
Now, Ida and Ivy McCall were identical in looks but not in temperament. Ivy liked boys and bonfires and skinny-dipping at Greer’s Ford. Ida liked books and birds and sitting quiet by the fire. Puck thought it’d be poetic if they both fell for the same fella—poetic, he said, like one of them “ballads the old folks sing.”
So he whispered to the wind and doused a jug of blackberry wine with moonlit dew and redbird feathers. Left it right where the twins would find it.
They did.
And both of them fell head-over-heels for Jimmy Pike, who worked at the feed store and couldn’t tell the twins apart if one of ‘em were on fire.
There was shouting. Hair-pulling. Ida started speaking in rhymes for three whole days and nobody knows why.
Jimmy Pike ran off with a trucker named Steve.
Puck was delighted.
“Love finds a way!” he hollered from the treetops. “Even sideways!”
Eventually, Old Granny Mays—who’s lived in the holler since before roads got names—marched out into the woods with a sassafras switch and a pocket full of salt.
She found Puck napping in a squirrel’s nest, covered in rose petals and love notes stolen from school lockers.
“Boy,” she said, “you’re meddlin’ where you oughtn’t. Folks need to fall in love on their own, else it don’t stick.”
“But I’m helpin’!” Puck chirped, blinking big hazel eyes. “Ain’t nothin’ better than love! It’s like... pie! But feelin’s pie!”
“Problem is,” Granny Mays said, “you’re makin’ the wrong recipes. Sometimes folks need time, not magic.”
Puck looked real sad at that. His wings drooped like wilted lilies. But he nodded, and promised to try.
Now he just leaves little hints—carved hearts in tree bark, warm breezes that smell like honeysuckle, songs in the whippoorwill’s cry. He watches from the shadows, hopeful and twitchy, like a matchstick near dry kindling.
And sometimes, when the moon is low and the frogs sing loud, two people’ll look at each other across a porch or a pasture and feel a strange flutter in their chest.
They’ll never know it, but Sweetgum Puck is smiling in the woods, his work finally done just right.
Moral: Never trust the wind in the holler if it smells like sweetgum and sassafras—it just might be love, and it just might be him.