We cannot call him back to live again.
Though I worked and revised this poem over a period of two years, and though it was eventually published, I was always a little dissatisfied with it because it ended on a sad and hopeless note. Eventually I started working on it again, writing version after version, until I came up with a very different poem.
On Streets of Gold
Dad’s dead.
He’ll never walk up Stoney Fork again,
Or take his dogs foxhunting in the hills at night.
The preacher says so.
Dad’s gone on before us to heaven, the preacher says.
We won’t see him again until we meet him in paradise.
Right now, the preacher says,
Brother Saylor is shouting up and down the streets of heaven.
When he gets tired of shouting for joy,
He’ll play on his harp awhile.
The preacher says he can see angels leaning on gates of pearl
To welcome Brother Saylor home.
I try very hard to see Dad on the golden streets.
I strain to hear the strings of the harp he plays
While angels listen.
I can’t see or hear him anywhere.
I get up to run from the church.
“She’s taking it hard,” I hear a woman say.
Outside I look at the ridges and valleys,
The hills where Dad loved to hunt.
White clouds
Driven by April winds,
Move across the valley
And cloud shadows glide over the ground.
I see Dad on the hill back of the church!
He and the Lord Jesus are walking and talking together.
Dad pulls down a branch of dogwood tree
As he points to the crown of thorns in the center
And the bloodstains in the outer edges of the petals.
A little farther on Dad scoops away dead leaves
That have drifted against a fallen tree,
Jesus bends over to look at a cluster
Of blue Sweet Williams.
They stop for a moment and Jesus points to the
Smoky distance of mountain ranges, to white clouds
In the blue sky. They both turn quickly
To watch a red bird fly across the valley.
White clouds fly fast in April winds.
Shadows move across the ground.
Dad and the Lord Jesus have gone out of sight.
I will see them forever in my heart.
Finally, I could let Dad go. I knew he was in the light with God. We are from the light, and sooner or later we will go back to that light. If getting there requires death, so be it.
8
Honeybees and Birch Trees
I am passionate about each of the four seasons
and have no difficulty finding reasons for being so.
Dad, Grandpa, and several of my uncles each kept five or six hives of bees. Most of Dad’s hives were homemade except for one lovely blue one; it looked so elegant and out of place sitting there in the row. I have often wished that I had asked him where he ever got such a pretty thing as that blue hive.
I have read that one of the more important and ancient foods in the wild was honey. The English brought the honeybee to America in the early 1600s. The settlers took colonies of bees with them as they moved west, and some swarms escaped, returning to the wildnerness from whence they had been captured thousands of years before.
If you found a bee tree and you marked it, even if it was on some-one else’s land, it was yours. The mark of the Saylor men was two parallel vertical slashes cut into the bark of the tree. This mark let everyone in the community know that the Saylors had claimed this tree. You had to get permission from the landowner to cut the tree, but since most of the mountains where we lived was “company land,” Dad did not have to get permission to use the trees he found there. (Rich corporations bought mineral rights to thousands of acres of land for as little as fifty cents an acre. Some of them also bought timber rights. This land was called “company land.”)
In order to get the bees and their honey out of the trees, we made “bee gums”—homemade beehives. Black gum trees are almost always hollow near the ground and can be made into excellent bee gums. Dad would cut a black gum and saw the trunk into appropriate lengths for a hive. Then he would hollow out the pieces, using a long chisel to round out and smooth down the insides. After this was done he bored four holes, one at each point of the compass, and put two sticks horizontally through the gum at right angles to each other, the ends of the sticks resting in the holes. Then Dad made a flat head for the top of the gum and put a slanted lid above the flat top to keep rain from running into the gum. Last of all, he cut a small half-circle (somewhat like mouse holes in comic strips and Tom and Jerry cartoons) in the bottom edge, thus making an entryway for the bees. Though the bees would enter at the bottom of the gum, they always chose the top half for their honey, suspending their brood combs from the top and using the crossed sticks as supports. When he was done, Dad would set his bee gums on a raised platform several inches off the ground.
To fill his new bee gums, Dad would go “coursing” the wild bees. He put corncobs soaked in honey in a cleared spot in the woods, sat down nearby, and waited for the bees to find the bait. Soon dozens of bees were attracted to the spot. When they rose up to fly home he noted the direction and followed. It might take several baits placed out before he could find the bee tree.
Dad cut bee trees early in the spring when there were plenty of blossoms from which they could make new honey. Bees began to swarm around the first of April. If they swarm much later, say in late June, they will not have enough time to collect the honey they need to see them through the winter. The day before this targeted time he would take a new bee gum and set it in place near the tree. Early the next day he and his helper (who was I, when I got big enough) carried a crosscut saw, axe, and a tub or large bucket in which to place the honey from the tree. Dad would notch the tree to get it to fall in a certain direction.
After the tree fell, he used a bee-smoker, in which he burned old rags, to puff billows of smoke around. This would make the bees settle. He also wore a mask and gloves as protection, although I did not think the bees would sting him. Dad said that bees could tell if a person was afraid. I tried not to be afraid but never quite succeeded; sometimes I was badly stung.
Dad brought the bee gum and positioned it near the fallen tree. If a tree was hollow, sometimes it split lengthwise when it fell, making his task simpler. He usually made a cut two or three feet above the hole where the bees were and another the same distance below, then split a place along the grain to expose the honey. Inside would be nothing but chaos—dead bees, smashed honey chambers, and the frightened bees.
Lifting out a piece of honeycomb, Dad put it inside the bee gum. Then he took out what honey he could salvage. In the process he could usually find the queen bee; he would set her near the hole in the bee gum. The attendant bees swarmed around her, and soon they all crawled into the hole. We let the bees settle overnight and then early next morning Dad went for them. He plugged up the hole and put a sheet over the bee gum to keep the bees inside while he carried it home. It was marvelous how well the bees survived the trauma and how quickly they set to work building new combs and filling the fresh cells with honey.
When the hive got overcrowded the bees swarmed. One of the queens would leave, taking a portion of the worker bees with her to a new home. Dad always seemed to know when it was time for bees to swarm. I asked him how he knew.
“It’s simple,” he replied. “All you have to do is watch for the signs. Nothing happens in nature without a sign being given.”
Taking me to a hive he said, “Look at the pattern of bees outside on the front.” Looking closer I could see bees clinging to the outside in the shape of a horseshoe. “Within three days that hive will swarm unless something is done to relieve the congestion,”
he said.
With modern beehives another compartment, called a “super,” can be set on top of a crowded hive, and the bees will move up into it and start making honey there. Homemade gums could not be adapted that way, so Dad watched for the bees to swarm and tried to settle them down near a new bee gum.
When we needed honey Dad took it from the hives, but seldom more than once a year. We spoke of it as robbing the bees, and in a way that is exactly what we were doing. Dad liked to take honey during the new moon in June. This gave the bees plenty of time to replenish the honey before cold weather had a chance to set in. Sometimes on a country road outside Berea I see bees around a water hole, and I watch them rise, circle to get their bearings, and then take off, heading for their hives or bee trees. Sometimes, feeling very nostalgic, I remember the many times Dad coursed the bees and brought wild honey to our table.
Birch Sapping in June
A favorite excursion when I was a child was to go birch sapping. Every year during the first new moon in June, Mama and Aunt Mossie took us to the birch trees. Mama said the sap was best if it was taken during the first new moon in June. We always looked for a tree that was at least twenty-four inches in diameter, because a smaller tree would die if you removed too much bark. (Dad always cut the bark and stripped it away in a complete circle around any tree he wanted to kill in order to clear new ground for a patch of corn.) We carried buckets, spoons, and a hatchet or long sharp knife when we set out.
Once we had found a suitable tree, using the hatchet or knife, we cut a square or rectangular outline in the bark. After the patch was outlined we took a flat knife and inserted it under the bark all along the edges. When the piece was loosened so that we could get our fingers under the edges we stripped it from the tree. Then, as soon as each piece was taken from the tree, we used a large tablespoon to scrape the fiber from the inside of the bark. We’d drop the long strips of sappy fiber into a pail where we had put a quart or two of clear, sweet, spring water. The fiber had to get into the water quickly in order to keep from turning dark. When we had enough for our purposes, we added half a cup of sugar and let the mixture stand for about an hour or so in a cool place (we did not have refrigeration at that time). Once we drained off the liquid we had a delightful summertime drink. We’d also chew the fiber strips after we’d drained the sap, in order to tease out their last bit of sweetness.
Birch Sap Candy
We did not often make candy when I was a child because we had little money to buy sugar. We used honey and molasses as sweeteners in most of our baked products. We made molasses taffy and molasses butter.
I had read about people tapping sugar maples in New England and boiling down the juice into maple syrup. This sounded fascinating to me, and because I always loved the delicate flavor of birch and wondered how the sap would taste boiled down into candy, one spring when I was about twelve years old I decided to tap a birch tree. Early one morning I made my way to a good-looking birch, bored a small hole into its trunk, and inserted a hollow tube I had made by slipping a round of bark from a tree limb. I hung a small bucket under the tube and waited patiently for the sap to start flowing. But it dripped so slowly that I lost patience; leaving everything in place at the tree, I went home. Several hours later I went back to check and found about half a cup of liquid. Carefully pouring this into a jar, I again went home to wait a while longer.
Just before it got dusky dark, I went back to the birch tree and found another half cup of liquid. I carried the liquid home. To make the candy I added about two cups of sugar to the cup of birch sap and poured it into a kettle to boil.
When a small amount formed a hard ball when the hot mixture was dropped in water, I decided the candy was ready. I poured it onto a flat, oiled surface, as I had seen Mama do when she made taffy. When the mixture was partly cooled but before it hardened, I marked the surface in squares. I made the cuts deep so that the candy could be broken along the lines when it was cold.
When the candy hardened, it looked like a clear sheet of ice. The result was great; my sisters and brothers loved the birch candy as much as I did.
Bloodroot
What an explosion of memories comes to me when I think of blood-root. I remember how we picked bloodroot flowers to decorate our play-houses and ourselves in my childhood years on Straight Creek and Stoney Fork.
When I began working in the Special Collections Department of the Berea College Library, I had the chance to research just about any subject that I wanted to know about. I found out some interesting facts about bloodroot.
Bloodroot is named for the red-orange sap that flows whenever you break its thickened root. My sisters and I used the juice to paint our fingernails and toenails and anything else we wanted to paint. We were disappointed that it washed off so easily, because we wanted to keep our painted nails all day.
In the hills of Stoney Fork, sometimes bloodroot bloomed as early as February, but it usually was not among the first flowers of spring. Solitary flower buds emerge sheathed inside rolled-up leaves that gradually relax as the flowers open. Each blossom consists of eight to sixteen petals arranged in rows around bright-yellow stamens. After the flowers drop, rich, green, deeply lobed leaves carpet the ground until late summer.
I wanted to transplant bloodroot in my yard after I got married. I found out that fall and winter are the best times for transplanting blood-root. But you can divide it in late summer or early fall. Make sure your soil is moist, well drained, and replete with organic matter. Set the root lengthwise into the ground, about one inch deep, with the buds pointing up. Space the plants about six to eight inches apart.
I read that American Indians used bloodroot sap in a number of ways. The men dabbed it on as war paint, while the women used it to dye baskets and cloth. The sap was also used as cough medicine. Considering that it contains a potentially lethal alkaloid, this seemed a bit like using a mallet on a mosquito, I thought.
Special June Days and July a Delight
In June we would begin to harvest produce from our garden. I will never forget the satisfaction of eating tender new beans, new potatoes, tomatoes and cucumbers, sweet corn, a pan of hot, golden cornbread, and cold milk or ice tea. Admittedly, if we’d had a cold spring we might not see tomatoes and green beans until July. But they will always be associated in my mind as June foods.
There are other special days in June, days that bring back memories of when I was a child. My mother was born on June 22, 1909, in Leslie County, Kentucky, on Laurel Branch. (Dad’s birthday was in the summertime, too: August 12, 1911.) She and Dad were married in June 1930.
The middle brother, Fred, was born June 16, 1943. Other days in June are also memorable. Many people universally hold Father’s Day dear. My husband Grant was born June 19, 1947. (When Grant and I married, my son Bruce suddenly had three presents to buy on Father’s Day—one for his dad, one for Grant, and another for Grant’s birthday, which often coincided with Father’s Day.)
I always loved the month of July. It meant pure summer—generous sunshine—wondrous green leaves and grass. Perhaps because it is Independence month, it makes me think of the phrase “July Jubilee.” In July especially, the landscape and sounds of the forest, the look of the moon at night, the slant of light during the day, and the falling rain all give me a deeper perception, a keener awareness of what the word has to offer. When we have a cold, wet spring, it is sheer delight to soak up July’s warmth.
Blackberries
I have mixed feelings about berry-picking in June and July. On the one hand, I enjoy eating the ripe berries. But on the other hand, they have to be picked first. This was chigger feast time and also the time for wood ticks, which would become badgering pests if we were not careful. And we also had to watch out for snakes.
Granny Brock would carry a stout stick and walk ahead of us children, beating the weeds and making as much noise as she could to scare the snakes away. It was scary to be standing still while she did this, and then suddenly see the tall grass
start swaying ahead of us or around the side of the hill, something moving through it. It might just have been a rabbit or other small creature. But we were convinced it was a snake Granny had scared into running away.
I tried to be brave as I poked my hands into the green-matted briars to grab those perfect, plump berries. Yet I spent so much time looking out for snakes Granny could pick two buckets for every one of mine. The blue-black berries often tempted us at first. But eating a few would usually sate our appetites.
Granny Brock or Mama would make the blackberries into a hot cobbler for supper, and would use them to make jam for future biscuits. After feasting on fried chicken, simmered green beans, tomatoes, and golden cornbread, blackberry cobber made a perfect finish to our July supper.
When huckleberries ripened, it was usually the men and bigger boys who went to pick them. Huckleberries grew on the top of hills and ridges, and they were difficult to find and pick. Huckleberry picking was considered men’s work.
One day, however, Dad took me with him to pick huckleberries. I cannot quite remember what made him decide to let me join him, but I do remember how excited I felt and how I bragged to Della. She wanted to go with us, but Dad said no, it was too rough a trip for her. Dad and I climbed up the hillside and worked our way around the ridge until we found a growth of huckleberry bushes. I was not afraid of snakes or anything else because I knew Dad would not let anything hurt me.
We started picking, and the sun climbed higher and higher in the sky. By the time it was directly overhead I was tired, hungry, and thirsty.
Dad found a little cleared space in a sheltered area and built a small fire. He cut three or four limbs from a bush and sharpened the ends. Then he took a piece of lean bacon and a piece of cornbread out of his hunting pouch. He cut small chunks of bacon and speared them onto the sticks. We held these over the fire until the meat was cooked. A chunk of bacon broiled over a fire and eaten with cornbread, the hot grease soaking into the bread, made a tasty meal there on top of that hill.
My Appalachia Page 7
