Rains come and wash your land away. It washes away, down into the mountain streams, these after heavy rains often running thick yellow, like molasses.
John Brandon, Kit’s father, had made himself a piece of new ground on a hilltop. He did it by ringing the trees. You go through the standing-timber in the fall and chop a ring completely around each tree and it dies. They stand up there, these forests of dead trees, like ghosts. Now the sunshine can get down, through the dead tree branches to the soil to let the corn grow. It is hard, back-breaking plowing, roots of killed trees catching your plow point, you, at the plow handles, often jerked, even thrown over the plow. John Brandon kept chickens in a little shed back of his house and had saved the chicken droppings. He saved the wood ashes from the open fireplace in his cabin — this for fertilizer. The younger children of the family carried the ashes up the hill, in tin pails. They dumped it in a little heap. Kit took a pailful of the mixture and went along the rows. She had a little sack, “a poke,” she called it, of seed corn, slung over her shoulders.
Her father, that dark alive man, silent, working with her, making the holes for the seed corn, into which she dropped the seed. The chicken droppings scraped up and saved and the wood ashes spread over the ground. The spring day turned hot. There were cut raw places on her hands. The lye in the wood ashes burned the cut places. She was fourteen and growing tall. This was during the spring after her adventure with the man in the house. The smaller children had got their work done and had gone away. She and her father had brought their lunch up into the field and ate it sitting on the grass at the field’s edge. “We didn’t talk,” Kit said, and I knew what she meant. Mountain people, like Indians, can work or sit together for hours without speaking. Knowing that mountain women commonly work in the fields with their men, I asked Kit about her mother.
“She was down there, in bed I guess,” she said. There was contempt in her voice. “When there was work to do she was always sick.” She would have been down there, in her dirty bed, lying there. Kit said her father seldom spoke to his wife. He had got her, was stuck with her, she said. Like many another man with a slovenly or ill-tempered wife he had found silence the best way out. Kit had got the breakfast for the family. She had fried fat pork and made corn bread to take up the hill to eat at the noon hour.
She was slow getting to the point, sitting in my car, telling about that day, so evidently a vitally important day in her life — she the woman of thirty, slender and good to look at.
There were rings on the fingers that had once dropped the mixture of wood ashes and chicken manure in the corn holes in the field.
She spoke of a stream that came down from a higher mountain, high beyond the one in which they were planting corn.
I had got a feeling as to what was coming as she talked.
She kept speaking of the stream, the sound the stream made, falling down over rocks, bends in the road beyond — the dead trees standing up white and gaunt, in the field. “My father was more silent than I’d ever known him to be.
“My dress was torn. I had on a thin old dress. I hadn’t any underwear.”
She said a cowbird kept calling in the wood near by. “It was almost time to quit for the day. I had to go on down to the house. We had two cows to milk that year,” she said.
She was about to leave the field, having reminded her father of the milking to be done before darkness came, when he touched her arm. “Come on,” he said, and she said also that the touch of her father’s hand on her shoulder that evening did something strange to her. “Right away,” she said, “I thought of that other fellow, the big man touching me that way down there in the house.” Her father led the way out of the field, and over a fence into another field where thick laurel grew. Kit said she followed her father in silence, wondering a little — in a way new to her — fearful of him. They came, she said, to where the stream they could see from the field came down through a wood.
There was a little place with grass.
She said there was a place you could look through, where the stream went down. It was, as I understood her, a kind of vista.
There were thick mountain rhododendron all along the stream.
You could look through, between tall trees, just coming into leaf now, along the stream and down and far away to where there was another wood, across the little valley, the big road that went to their mountain town, the county seat, cutting across their valley farther down and disappearing in the wood beyond. “I saw a car go along the road,” she said. She broke off, telling the story and I, listening, did not look at the woman telling it. We were in my car and she stopped the car beside the road, on a low hill. This in early evening. There was a silent time and I saw in fancy the hill child and her father coming through the wood and to the grassy place by the stream’s edge as in a moving picture. Odd that I already knew what was coming. “I saw a car go along the road,” Kit said again, and as she said it I saw a man, in a farmyard, with a woman and some children, get into a car, to drive off to some Western town, along the road we were going. Kit also saw it. “I guess maybe they’re going to the movies,” she said.
She broke off, breaking from the present and immediate into the past and her childhood, to speak of the bit of road she could see from between the thick bushes that grew beside the stream where she went with her father, saying that she had, at that time, been to town but once in her life. She was wanting to tell her story and not wanting. It may be that she was a little fearful that the telling would change my attitude toward her. She began sparring for time and started another story.
She had gone with her father to a trial at the courthouse where he was a witness. It was a trial of that man, the man with the cigar who had touched her breasts with his fingers, and he was being tried for liquor making.
Her father was on the stand lying.
“Didn’t you make liquor with him, John Brandon?”
“No, sir, I didn’t.”
“He was seen at your house. He came there several times. He was seen coming and going.”
“Yes, he came.”
“You were in with him then? You made liquor with him? You were one of the men who made liquor with him?”
“No, sir, I wasn’t.”
“What was he doing at your house?”
“I dunno.”
A lawyer getting facetious. “Was he courting? Was there some one to court there?”
“No, sir, there wasn’t!”
“Stand aside.”
They had got nothing out of John Brandon, her father. She said she did not want to tell the story of the evening with her father and, sensing a little the significance of what she was trying to get at, I tried to help her.
“At that place, by the stream, that evening, did he just..”
“No. He said we would wash.”
“Did you know what was coming?”
“No. I did and I didn’t.”
There was in Kit evidence of an old terror. As she talked in a low voice, hurriedly, I had the curious feeling that the mature woman, sitting with me in the car, had gone and that the mountain girl she had once been had returned. Something happened that definitely ended her relations with her father and that perhaps brought on a premature maturity but it was not what I was fearing and I was intensely relieved.
There was my own imagination, leaping forward as she talked, her words coming in low broken sentences.
They were there, father and daughter, at the creek’s edge, in the failing light, and her father took off his clothes and bathed. He did hot look at her put presently spoke. “Take off your things,” he said gruffly and she undressed. “Now come here.” There was this strange terrible moment for the child about to become a woman. She went trembling toward him. There is a look that comes into men’s eyes. It was now almost dark in there, under the trees, and the stream, coming down over rocks to form a little pool, made a roaring noise.
And there had been that other experience in the mountain cabin... the man w
ith the cigar and the thick fingers on her young breasts. In these isolated families in the hills, sometimes....
He gathered cold water in his cupped hands and began to bathe her, the cold water falling down over her slender shoulders. His fingers touched her flesh, the figure of the other man, with the great cow-like mouth, danced before her.
“I don’t know. I guess I’ll never know,” she said.
She grew suddenly alarmed and ran from him. There was a sudden snapping of the cord that had bound her to him and she ran, snatching up her clothes. She ran through a strip of wood and across the upland cornfield, naked in the evening light. He didn’t call to her, didn’t pursue. She slipped into her clothes, standing at the field’s edge near the house.
Kit didn’t say anything more, except to explain, after a long silence, that what happened to her that evening up there in the hills, at the stream’s edge, hadn’t meant much to her and it was very evident as she gave the explanation, trying to laugh as she did so, that she had been quite ruthless with herself, had torn open an old sore.
She was far from clear also as she told me of how, later that night, when it was dark in the house she came down, silently, out of the little loft, where she slept with the younger children, climbing silently down an outside ladder, and got out of her father’s house.
“I walked all night. I went to town and beyond.”
“Did you take any food?”
“No,” she said.
I was still curious.
“Did you have any money?”
“No, I hadn’t a cent,” she said and began, a little too eagerly, to explain that she hadn’t left her home because of what she feared might happen.
“It wasn’t that. I just thought I’d go,” she said.
Kit ended her story with that declaration and then an odd and to me quite terrifying thing occurred. She was driving and had stopped the car under a tree beside the road but with her story’s end, she drove on. She drove desperately and rather madly I thought, the light having gone out of the day. I remember that we went whirling, at terrific speed, through a town. She hadn’t turned on the lights. We went plunging along thus, in darkness, for perhaps a half hour, passing cars, people yelling at us and then, turning on two wheels into a side road, she eased the car down and lit a cigarette.
“Perhaps I’d better turn on the lights,” she said, without smiling, and, “Yes, Kit, it would be a good idea,” I answered.
CHAPTER TWO
A BUSINESS MAN, of a certain town of the Upper South, first told me of Kit Brandon. “Boy, God,” he said, “she’s a tornado.
“And so innocent looking too.”
One evening quite late he was driving his car to his home through a quiet residence street in his town.
There was a sudden uproar and he pulled his car out to the side of the road and stopped.
“I was scared stiff,” he said. “Great God,” he exclaimed, telling me of the adventure.
Although he was on a quiet street he could go on along that street, in that particular town, past several big estates, some of them many acres in extent, the sort of places rich people affect, big stone pillars, a border of box or pine trees along the paved road, boxwood, bought at huge prices from dealers who get them for a song from old impoverished Virginia home owners not on to the racket... reset on wide lawns... a big green house, two or three gardeners employed, winding paths, an artificial lake with water lilies, wooden and stone seats under trees, stable for saddle horses.
Wife a member of the local garden club, sending off to Europe for bulbs.
“Great God,” the business man said, “What the hell’s broke loose now? I was scared stiff.
“Since there’s been so much kidnapping going on in the country a man, who has buckled into a little dough... or if he has kids.”
“They might even grab the wife,” I said, and, “Yes,” he said and smiled. “That would be an idea,” he said.
It was a liquor-running fleet, six cars, all high-powered, come off a highway that led back, a hundred miles or more, to the hills and the rough country... this in a North Carolina cotton mill and cigarette town... millionaires in the town too... they got rich fast during the World War, the cotton mill men.
.. big mill villages, owned by the mill men, out somewhere, in another part of the town — or beyond the town limits, rows and rows of small frame houses, just alike, flower beds in front of each door sometimes, all just alike.
“If a man can’t be safe from flying bullets even in his own street, in his own town. These federal men ought to clean those people out.”
The man talking to me having all through the prohibition period his own bootlegger to look out for his needs. He’d been drinking with some of his rich friends that very night. It was past midnight.
“I may even have been a little bit drunk.” He thought that Kit, who was piloting the liquor cars and was several blocks ahead of them, must have been making eighty.
I gathered that the federal men, several of them, in a big fast car were after the convoy of rumrunners. They were trying to cut out cars, shoot holes in tires. The cars roared down upon my acquaintance, the rich man.
“And then?”
And then a car shot out of a side street and hit the car carrying the federal men and wrecked it. It was Kit, who must have gone whirling aside, into a side street and had doubled back. “She acted as though her life didn’t mean a damn thing to her,” my acquaintance said. Kit’s car was also wrecked, smashed — but in a moment she crawled out of it and ran to where the federal men lay.
Luckily none of them were killed.
“I don’t know whether it was lucky or not. I don’t like those guys much,” the rich man said. There was a man had two ribs broken and another had his head cut rather badly.
The six rum-running cars Kit had been piloting went flying on their way. They disappeared.
My own acquaintance, telling me all this later — we sat comfortably enough in a New York speakeasy — saw a slender young girl crawl out of the car that had caused the wreck. She had a long cut on one of her arms, from flying glass, he thought.
“Oh, dear. Oh, dear,” she kept saying. “I lost control,” she said. “There was something went wrong with my brakes.”
She seemed quite cut up about the federal men, helping each other out of the wreck.
They hauled her up, of course, had her in court and she paid a fine— “for reckless driving,” my man said, and laughed. “Reckless! Why it was inspired,” he said. He said he thought maybe the judge was fixed.
“She had a good explanation all right,” he said. At that time Kit wasn’t very well known. She hadn’t yet become a newspaper story.
“But just the same,” said my acquaintance, a North Carolina business man... he is pretty shrewd, I take it for granted he must be, he has made so much money... I had the feeling that he was getting wise after the fact.... “Just the same,” he said, “I had a hunch. She was standing under a street lamp and was going on like that. ‘Oh, you poor men, you poor men.’ A hell of a lot she cared. She was a damned good actress, I’ll say.”
The federal car, when she had hit it, had skidded right across the road and into a tree and later my man had to go and be a witness when Kit was up for trial. She had a good story about where she’d been and how she happened to be out alone at that time of night. “I didn’t know then, not until afterward, and the court didn’t know that she was living, at that time, with the son of the biggest bootlegger in our part of the State,” my man said.
He was a little shocked. He found out later that the crowd with which Kit was working were the very ones that brought him his stuff.
“I had a kind of feeling for her... I swear I did,” he said, “seeing her standing there, so young and brave looking under a street light.” He said she had on a white blouse and that the arm of it was all covered with blood.
“I took her and the two hurt federal men in my car to a hospital in town and there we got out
of the car, some men from the hospital helping the man with the broken ribs....”
He spoke of a light, over the front entrance to the hospital.
“She seemed such a lady to me.
“And yet.
“I found out later, that she once worked in one of my mills.”
However, he went to see her once; he had in some way found out where she was living. It was while her cut arm was mending. He had got a notion, perhaps a hope. He had seen her go roaring along the street, ahead of the rum-running car, but he did not say so in court. He had seen her then and had seen her later, standing under a street light when she had crawled out of her car. He had heard her words of sympathy for the hurt men, himself sitting in his own car at the side of the street — her declaration that her brake had gone wrong. He said he saw a little smile play over her lips as she stood wringing her hands by the wrecked car in the street. “I made up my mind I’d better let her alone,” he said.
There must have been several rather dreary years for Kit Brandon — in between. When she went down out of the hills, barelegged, barefooted, after the adventure with her father, frightened and also shocked. She became a factory worker.
We spoke of the night when she ran away from home.
“And did you get down to the town, to the county-seat town before it was light?”
“Yes. I ran most of the way. It was still dark when I got to town. I went on through.”
There was that picture of Kit, as girl child, so self-possessed when I knew her. Her association afterwards with men — hard-boiled enough men, most of them rumrunners and crooks — had perhaps given her her self-possession. I went afterwards to see some of her later associates, talked with several of them. They had an attitude, I thought, like men at war. There was a war on — a special race sprung up in the midst of society, in cities, in the hill country of the Upper South, gangs formed, leaders sprung up. There were native-born Americans, in the cities shrewd Jews, men from the south of Europe, Italians, Hungarians, Czechs.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 178
