Child of the Woods

by Susi Gott Séguret

  The neighbor girls were our ages, and they were already aunts—an enviable position. Their mother had had her first child at the age of twelve, and that child had had her first at the age of thirteen, so the twenty-five-year-old mother was a grandmother, and her younger daughters, as I’ve said, were aunts.

  Missy was the cutest little niece you could imagine: blonde curls, dimply face, freckles, and a lisp. We all played Little Mothers, and Tim, of course, got the all-important role of Little Husband and Father.

  Mostly we played in the barn, where we could make miniature houses out of baccer sticks. “Tobacco” sticks, as I had been taught to say, because my parents came from the north, but everyone else said “baccer.”

  Without warning, one of the sticks moved. The neighbor girls ran to fetch their mother, who ran out with her pistol. BANG! And there was the copperhead, lying on the dusty barn floor with his brains blown out. He hadn’t even had time to finish digesting the mouse that was his reason for risking intrusion on human grounds.

  The youthful grandmother was scared to death of snakes. In summer she wouldn’t even let her girls walk the few paces out to the mailbox for fear they might “git bit.” That our parents would let my brother and me visit so far away unaccompanied was probably unfathomable to her. But she always welcomed us into the cool cleanliness of her green house trailer, with true Southern hospitality, and fed us fresh biscuits or cornbread straight from the oven, coupled with slices of fresh ripe tomato, and a glass of buttermilk or sweet tea.

  And we never did “git bit,” despite the numerous times we made the excursion, even on the stretch of road between their mailbox and trailer-home.

  The Hills are Alive

  “The hills are alive, with the sound of music…”

  This was my song (once I’d outgrown “Crawlin’ and a-Creepin’”), and I sang it at the top of my lungs, from the highest point of my parents’ property. I’d ridden my horse, Silver, up that far, and then set him free to run and caper while I did handstands and turned cartwheels and sang like a bird turned wild. We were both intoxicated, my horse and I, and our show was for the trees and the wind and anything else that was brave enough to be our immediate audience.

  The Sound of Music was among the first films my parents took me to see. But not the very first.

  My introduction to the world of cinema was Woodstock. I was eight years old, my brother six, when we sat in front of the screen in an old small-town movie theater and listened to Joan Baez sing, “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night…” and marveled at the mountains of garbage left by a human race that was supposed to care. The scene I remember best is that of a row of butts, bouncing up and down to the rhythm of a step. It was a close-up of a half-dozen naked men walking along, arm-in-arm, without a care in the world. This is where it’s all at, man.

  Which makes me think of a family who stayed with us for a couple of months that winter. They were from California, with visions of moving east, and they camped out in our barn loft for two months before they found a neighbor’s old house to rent. Their little boy was my age and was all about peace and love. He drew peace signs (I always thought he was saying “pee signs”) on everything that had a surface exposed to marking. That and choppers; long, streamlined motorcycles with fancy engines, designed in black indelible ink. I had a brand-new pad of drawing paper which I had been given for my birthday and (to my great dismay) he filled it—with peace signs and choppers. A strange combination: pacifism mixed with go-get-’em-at-any-price-and-we’ll-show-’em.

  The father of the California family was a tall, gentle man, a musician, and was under suspicion by the neighbors because he had hair down to his shoulders. Not long before, another of our visitors, a “fwi kid” (a student of a travelling school called the Friend’s World Institute), had gone down to the local store and been attacked by a pair of scissors. He wasn’t harmed, but he came back with short hair.

  Gentle Father was in the local store one day when $100 was discovered missing from the cash register. It was easy to blame the mishap on a stranger, and he was escorted to the Madison County jail for a night. Daddy had to put down all the money he possessed at the moment—about $500—on bail to get him out. The family went back to California, spent a lot of money on lawyers, finally sent $100 by mail to settle the matter, check got lost, Gentle Father was banned from the county.

  He’s been back to visit us since, at night, between tours to China singing peace songs with his wife and standing on picket lines in Kentucky mining strikes. Always with a song to sing…

  We’d better listen to the voices from the mountains

  Trying to tell us what we just might need to know

  ’Cause the empire’s days are numbered if we’re counting

  And the people just get stronger blow by blow…

  Did You Live in a Cave?

  “Did you really live in a cave?”

  I was a bit taken aback by the question, posed to me by one of my high school classmates.

  “I heard it said that when you folks first moved down here from up north, you lived in a cave till you got your house built.”

  I knew that a lot of other rumors had circulated about us, but this was the first time I’d heard that one.

  My parents were the first outsiders (aside from the Zimmermans in 1913) to move into the hidden valley of Shelton Laurel since the turn of the century, when a small group of Presbyterian missionaries had come in and built a church, a school, and a hospital, long since in ruins. When my parents arrived, there was no paved road running through the valley; only a dirt wagon track that wound beside the small river, leading in one direction to Johnson City, Tennessee, and in the other to Greeneville, Tennessee. They had found a little loop of North Carolina, seldom crossed because of the formidable mountain roads.

  If you approach the county by car from the flatness of Tennessee, you are unprepared for the mountains that rise up out of the blue. And they are blue, too—the Blue Ridge, or the Great Smoky Mountains, so called because they are almost always enveloped in a haze of mist, formed from humidity evaporating from their lush greenness. One moment you are looking at them in awe, and the next moment you are swallowed up by them, taken into their arms as a mother gathers a baby to her breast. And it is a similar sensation; you feel protected, nourished, suddenly a child again, and you know that all you need for life is right here, hidden in these oldest of hills.

  So it was that my parents stumbled across their home-to-be after two months of camping out in farmers’ fields in the surrounding area, looking for just the right spot. They had been married shortly before and had set off in their little VW bug with their sleeping bags and Daddy’s banjo, in search of the highest mountains and the most music. (They had heard that North Carolina was a good place for the music, and they’d looked on the map to pinpoint the mountains.) Following their nose and their ears, they ended up fifty miles north of Asheville, and lingered for a while with an old fiddler whose father offered to give them twenty acres of land if they would settle there. It was tempting, but not quite right.

  Then they discovered Shelton Laurel. A secluded green valley, flanked on all sides by mountains rising gently up to 5,000 feet, it was the dream they hadn’t known they had. They found an abandoned farm which they offered to rent while they searched out their own piece of land, and the 90-year-old lady who owned the farm refused to take a cent from them, although they lived there two years. And she gave them fresh milk from her cow and vegetables from her garden and taught them the essentials of mountain living.

  They were considered by all (locals and their northern parents alike) to be a little off in the head. These were educated people, looking to live like the old-timers of the mountains. They wanted to build a log house, hewn on two sides in the traditional style, split shingles, raise all their food and keep a cow, pig, chickens, and other basic farm animals. They wanted to plow with a mule (the stubbornest of creatures, to be avoided if at all possible), carry their own water, hea
t with a chimney, light with kerosene lamps that would need trimming every day, and—the ultimate symbol of being behind the times—they wanted an outdoor privy.

  You must know that this was in 1961, before the back-to-the-land movement began. If Peter and Polly Gott weren’t pioneers in the wilderness, they were pioneers in the return to the wilderness. But they didn’t have an inkling of that then. They weren’t trying to prove anything. They only had a vision of how they wanted to live and set out to find it.

  Not everyone was as immediately welcoming as the landlady. Strangers never did no good. Especially them northe’ners. In a place where nothing much happened out of the ordinary and change was so slow you didn’t notice it, the Civil War was still alive and well in most people’s memories. Even if many western Carolinians had sided with the North, figuring if they didn’t have slaves, by God, nobody else oughta have ’em. And they didn’t need nobody from the outside comin’ in and tellin’ ’em what to do, neither.

  Lucky for Daddy, he’d brought his 5-string along. Everybody, even the most taciturn, loved music. And they’d all ask him, “atter-a-while,” “if’n he could play that thang.” Just a verse of “Old Joe Clark” would bring smiles to faces, and some of the neighbors would kick up their heels and do a step or two. Some would even say, “Here, give me that banjer, son, and let me show ye how my granddaddy done it.” There were those (like old man Uncle George Landers) who hadn’t touched an instrument in years and who’d get all excited, and remember tune after tune. At night, after the chores were done, Daddy would try to remember what he’d heard, and the next time he saw a neighbor he could play it back note for note.

  Soon he was calling square dances in another rented shack and finding local people to play for them. Nobody had thought about calling dances in years because there was always so much trouble afterwards. Shelton Laurel was in a dry county, so there was a lot of illegal whiskey made by the light of the moon. Moonshine: kill ye or cure ye. That, combined with Scotch-Irish tempers, was a volatile invitation to “have it out.”

  But young Pete was just naïve (or ignorant, whichever way you want to put it) enough that he didn’t think twice about giving the dances another try. And people came. Swing your partner, do-si-do, promenade ’round with a heel ’n’ toe. “Boy, that young man can pick a banjer, and he can call them squar’ dances, too.”

  So, by and large, the young couple was adopted, and there were many who came to help them out and show them secrets about canning, basket-making, harvesting, and tanning ground-hog hides. And there were those, too, who drove up and stood by, their hands in their pockets whistling, looking on to see how them crazy young’uns was a-makin’ it.

  But, no, we never lived in a cave.

  Russian Spies

  My mother’s passion is for painting. Whenever she wasn’t standing over the hot wood cookstove canning vegetables, or washing clothes in big tin washtubs over an outdoor fire, you could find her out in the fields with her sketch book and watercolors. Being young and pretty, and not especially crazy about anyone seeing her work (these were her early days), she would fold up her paper and head the other way whenever she saw anyone coming.

  Thus was born the rumor that she was making secret maps of the area.

  Our family name being Gott, unheard of in this land of Sheltons and Franklins and Hensleys, the rumor kept growing. My parents were Russian spies, tasked with making maps of the area! (Russian?! Well, why not?)

  Later, after we had moved into the log house my parents built on forty acres of steep wooded land (bought for forty dollars an acre), word began to circulate up north about a homesteading couple who were doing everything by hand, and living on $200 a year: $3 for the kerosene to fill their oil lamps, $10 for seeds to plant their garden, $8 for coffee, and $8 for toilet paper (they had tried corn shucks and newspapers and even mullein leaves for a commendable amount of time, and had given in to that one luxury), with what was left over going for local taxes and a little gasoline.

  So we started having visitors. Of course we had no telephone to warn us of their arrival—they would just appear. And stay. The back-to-the-earth movement had begun, and young hippie couples were out looking for role models. I don’t know how the word got around so well, but I remember people spread out in sleeping bags all over our living room floor, and sometimes even lining the floor of our henhouse. And I remember my mother spending long hours over the hot stove when I knew she wanted nothing more than to be out painting. Or working with her clay (she had made the middle story of our cow barn into a functioning potter’s studio).

  It was lucky Mother and Daddy had planted a big garden. And dug a deep outhouse. We had an outdoor shower, which was a watering can hanging from a pole, with a string attached to the spout. Everyone was eager to try it. One of our neighbors, who happened to drop in for a visit before suppertime (when shower hour approached), caught sight of some of our guests wandering around naked with the watering can. Soon, the word began to circulate that we were running a nudist colony up there on the mountain.

  When Daddy had a new road bulldozed to the house—one that could be navigated in winter—he sowed grass seed on it to keep rains from washing it out. To keep people from driving on the road until the grass had taken hold, he built a heavy wooden gate out of walnut poles and padlocked it shut for the time being. So rumor had it that we were growing marijuana and had built the gate to keep revenuers out.

  Subsequently, we had a visit from the revenuers. They said they were out looking for stills and wanted to know where our “grass patch” was. Daddy had a hard time convincing them that all we grew was vegetables. Finally, turning to go, still looking skeptical, one of them happened to spot a plant Mother had allowed to grow outside the kitchen window because she thought it was pretty there. And by golly, if it wasn’t a marijuana plant! One of our unannounced visitors must have let a grain fall there, and Mom, in her innocence, thought it was a flower.

  It took more time to convince the revenuers that this was not sown on purpose. Turning to go for the last time, one of them looked back around, and said in a conspiratorial whisper to Daddy,

  “You haven’t got any seed a man could have, have you?”

  Old Man Hic

  “Howdy, Hic. How y’uns a-doin’ today, Hic?”

  “All right, thanks, Hic, how about you?”

  “Old Hic ain’t a-feelin’ too good today, Hic.”

  This was a typical greeting exchanged with one of our mountain neighbors. His given name was respectably proper, but for some reason unknown to everyone, he called himself Hic. And he called everyone else Hic, too.

  I never saw him dressed any other way than in an army grey-green work jacket and well-worn denim overalls, with a baseball-style cap of the same color as the jacket, pulled halfway down over his eyes. A greyish stubble coated his chin, which was habitually stained with tobacco juice that didn’t quite make its mark when he spat. His hand was stained with tobacco juice, too, from where he’d draw the back of it across his mouth after an extra-good target, wiping it with finality on his pants before recommencing the ritual.

  Old Hic was always around when the neighbors called for help to bring in the hay, or kill a pig, or hand tobacco. One day, the task was driving in tomato stakes. Daddy was wielding the twenty-pound sledge hammer, bringing it up and down under the hot sun with all of his young force. Old Hic was standing by in the shade of the weathered grey barn, a new chew of tobacco tucked in his cheek, face lost in reminiscence.

  “I used to swing one-a-them thangs, Hic,” he said in a voice mingling pride and regret. “Why, I was the stoutest damn man in the penitentiary!”

  We knew the old man had served his time, but he seemed harmless enough to Tim and me, although sometimes we had the disconcerting vision that he was a goblin who would reach out and grab us and make us disappear. Too many fairy tales, I suppose. Our imaginations needed something to feed on, and Old Hic—a lonely man who never married and lived in a tiny one-room log cabi
n perched precariously on a mountain ridge way up above us—was perfect fodder for our fantasies.

  In our wanderings, Tim and I often carried our day’s picnic up to another ridge, which looked across at his abode, and we’d stare at the smoke winding out of his fieldstone chimney and wonder what the old man was concocting over there all by himself. We imagined his house to be full of whiskey bottles and moonshine jugs. We had seen empty jars lying in a heap outside his front door, and we had no doubt about what had been in them. Often, when he came over to our house on his way up or down the mountain, the whiskey hung heavy on his breath, woven in with the heady smell of his chewing tobacco, a lingering note of wood smoke, and the rank odor of clothes slept in overnight.

  Despite our reservations about this figure, something drew us to walk by his cabin every time we were up that way. We would try to walk softly, not moving a stone or a leaf, careful not to snap a stick. Then, just as we thought we had made it by without being detected, the old man’s voice would reach us:

  “Come on in, Hic, I got somethin’ te give y’uns!”

  Tim and I looked at each other. We were caught now. Should we run for it and hope that he couldn’t follow quickly enough to grab us? Or should we risk going into his lair and get a good look around at the whiskey cache?

  Curiosity (and not wanting to be cowards) got the best of us, and we crossed the last stretch of woods that could have cushioned our escape. The old man held the door of his cabin open, and for a moment we could see nothing in the dim room which kept out the sunlight. Then our eyes began to pick out the plank table where all his rations were kept: a can of spam, some Campbell’s baked beans, a bucket of lard, an old tin of coffee. No whiskey anywhere to be seen. We were disappointed. He must have it hidden under the bed.