“Hot,” I said, feeling very blown.
“Warm,” he replied.
“You’re used to it”—from me.
“Uhhuh.”
“Do you often go this way?”
“Uhhuh.”
“Is it far?”
“Uhhuh.”
“Have you always lived in that creek?”
“Uhhuh.”
The only time he became eloquent was when we passed a deserted farm lying in a boulder-strewn clearing in the mountain forest.
“Beaumont Starr’s farm,” he drawled. “He left las’ spring. Hit was too hard. Siles gone old and wore out, an’ nothin’ ’ll grow in that thar.”
Tremendous chestnut trees shot like isolated gray columns out of the green ruin of thickets. Beaumont Starr had lived there with his brother, and their ancestors before them, tilling granite.
We climbed for three hours through steep woods of pine, balsam, chestnut and hickory; of bellwood, maple, walnut and oak—a struggle in green monotone. On the summit, which seemed unattainable, we finally flung ourselves down on the hard earth utterly exhausted; with a faint ocean of blue ranges palely washing and lapping in noiseless surge and foam of cloud-capped summits, below us.
The air was still. Not a sound. Not even the motion of one leaf touching another. It seemed that the world had stopped: that we lay supine at a point beyond all sound and effort, that we lay closely beneath the flawless and level ceiling of the world.
We saw sturdy and extraordinary foreshortened clouds and ethereal territories of mountains, range after range, merging into a haze of moth silver. The mountains were strips of water modeled by the air. Ranks of solidifying ether. Anything but mountains. Anything.
From our “Necket” we could see our ridge slung like a firm hammock of green from knob to knob, a blue-green causeway crossing the water of sky, or broad and churned with green and choppy light like the wake of a steamer. Distantly was Clingman’s Dome, with the other gray hosts, while a wide surf cloud lay fixedly, mazedly upon them. From their highest elevation bannered a stilly chrome wash of startled light.
We descended alone. Rain collapsed on the roof of the trees and spouted through. We shattered the forest silence as a rod splits emerald ice. We hurtled down, deeper at every jump, into the high and bare cold cavern of frigid trees. A shot suddenly was fired somewhere before us and below, and its staccato echoes ricocheted on the polished walls of green. Were we at last mistaken for revenue officers as had been prophesied ? But life lacks our sense of the dramatic. We soon came upon three hunters standing in a ditch and they smiled ironically at our little excitement.
When at last we came out under the open sky it was torn into rags of mist and vapors which drifted, a soaking tatterdemalion, across the knobs and creeks; and entering a valley, whose form was quite smudged out by rain and night, we splashed through sodden miles of clay, eight miles to the lumber camp, and found bed there.
Sitting in a Mountain Town
In the morning I crossed the river and walked into the town. It had a railway station, four churches, a bank, a main street, two side turnings and no “movie,” among other things, for the distraction of its eight hundred or more inhabitants.
An automobile road looping through the mountains from the center of North Carolina was just nearing completion, and during the day one might occasionally see gangs of colored men throbbing by on trucks to the excavations and quarries, and an odd white-bearded mountaineer of the old school riding horseback and sidling and prancing about as though he were conducting a daring military operation.
The main street of the town was shaded by an avenue of maples, and poplars with dull green and silver leaves. The wide almost motionless river was rust yellow and cloudy dense with clay flood water, on which lay the heavy cobalt and sepia shadows of trees.
In the street the sunlight opened in grotesque and formless gapes between rare shadows. Men in blue overalls and monstrous black hats were sitting on walls, fences and benches in the sun.
These men were spare, long and springy as whips. Some walked with guns behind their backs, or sat with their long ungainly legs propped up or pulled out across the pavement. They had lengthy, calculating noses, and judicious deprecatory chins. They rarely moved. But they saw everything.
One knew this by the sensitive jerking of the crowns of their hats, if a Ford car clattered by or if a cannonade of blasting pealed on the new road, or if a stranger crossed brazenly into the sun, and had his boots cleaned. Wind blew in casually, as everything else did.
The only thing to do in the town was to find a foot of unoccupied bench and sit on it. I sat. I sat for hours and watched better men than I—also sitting.
I sat on the wall of the bridge first of all, and soon another sitter there began to edge toward me. We inspected each other from under the brims of our hats. Our eyes reconnoitered. We tried to give our inevitable, approaching acquaintanceship a strategic casualness, as though it were an accident and not a matter of passionate curiosity.
The man was an Indian half-caste. His eyes were thick, cloudy and red hot. He pulled at his yellow, twiggy mustache and stared at the river. He said ultimately: “Thar’s right smart o’ fish in th’ river. Catfish. Yellow catfish and blue uns. An’ a redfeller—red horse like we call him.”
The sun wheeling like a white stream filled in the hollow of broken silence, leveled it up and flowed over as though nothing had happened. The half-caste pulled in his belt and let his length of leg dangle forward, and so stepped away as it were on tiptoe, like a marionette.
“Reckon I’ll turn aroun’ and seek arter a bit o’ grub,” he said. And he went to the barber’s doorstep and sat there in the shade.
The mountains lay in masterful elevation around the town and descended into it. Their ardent slopes, green-pored and filigreed, rose to every touch of sun. There were cool smoky blue forms of shadows modeled into the body of the ranges. A bare heat, like the look in an animal’s eyes, and a prolific coarseness and toughness, as of a bullock’s hide, were in the mountains. They stood like herds of green bison. The little town seemed within the casual print of a great mountain hoof.
I climbed up a stairway into the shade, and shortly a man came up and sat on the stair below me. He was oldish, agile, with stringy red skin, and a fistful of mustache stuffed under his nose like straw. He wore one brown boot and one black boot. We fell into conversation.
He had lived in the mountains all his life and knew every creek of them. He was very scornful of the “ol’ fellers” of the previous generation, and especially of their queer ways, speech and customs. And he fed his scorn on the constant reading of a book describing the amusing life of the mountaineers. He referred to them as “ol’ crackters.”
“Wan he came hyur and writ thata book he writ the truth. Hit’s jes the way the ol’ fellers uster speak. They was a quare c’llection. He’s a right smart boy, and the travelin’est man I knowed. He’s seed the whole worl’ except two states and now he jes stays foolin’ aroun’ writin’.”
His reference was to that noted writer on the mountains, Horace Kephart.
I led him gently to reminiscence.
“I’ve bin four times over Clingman’s Dome. Thar hain’t no trail, but twen’y y’ars ago a feller cut a wagon trail, figgerin’ he waur going to haul lumber along the top. But I reckon that’d be covered plumb up with laurel an’ trees, the way nobody wouldn’t never know it.
“I’ve done purty smart o’ b’ar huntin’, sometimes with the snow that high. B’ars is harmless an’ is jes as afeered of you as you is o’ them. Thar hain’t no real reason fer huntin’ up so, either. Rattlesnakes is the same. Reckon all animals is like that. Don’t harm them an’ they won’t touch ye.
“Waal, hit’s mighty dense up thar and terrible rough. If ye get up on top of the Dome and shins up a tree a man could see every whars in the worl’ almos’ till—till his eyes was a-tired o’ lookin’, an’ he come down an’ go away. But ye hafter climb.
The Dome’s too coveredly wi’ trees to see without.
“ Yeh, I’ve had many experiments with b’ars,” he continued. “Pete Hughes was the real boy fer b’ars, though. He fell into a b’ar wallow on the Dome one day an’ lit plum’ on top o’ the greates’ ol’ b’ar he’d ever seed, and kinda got into a reg’lar spat with him. Reckon that’s in the book, too. Wane’er the ol’ boy heered summat good like that he made a note of it so’s not to disremember.
“Nat’rally thar’s a sight o’ things bin writ that hain’t never occurred. Like ol’ Uncle Durham uster say that every time a story crossed water it doubled itself.
“Did you-uns ever hear o’ Phil Morris’s defeat? That’s a true un. Phil, like the rest o’ us, was in a kinda o’ mixed-up business. Hit’d be hard to say what kinda business it’d be with one thing an’ another an’ nothin’ reg’lar.
“Waal, we was up in the woods and thar was snow on the ground and the country ’most friz up. We lit a fire and Phil sits him down and offs with his boots to kinda rest up his feet like.
“Waal, durin’ the night one of them boots gets pushed into the fire and burned up. An’ in the mornin’ Phil sent up a great hollerin’, and had to make him moccasins out of his leggins and walk back sixteen miles in em. And ever since they have called that place Phil Morris’s defeat.”
A rending explosion of dynamite on the new road shook the town, and there was a short brushing of wind in the trees and the tossing up of a few birds.
“That’s the deefeninest n’ise,” said the man. “Muster bin like that in France. Was you-uns ever in France? Uh huh. French is heathians.”
“It’s hot in the sun,” I said.
“Waal now, I’ll tell ye, I hain’t bin out in the sun yet today. Reckon I’ll be broguin’ round a bit.”
And he backed obliquely down the stairs, brown boot first.
[1925]
1 For the past eight years Peru has been run by a dictator, the cholo general, Manuel A. Odria, who had outlawed the popular revolutionary party, APRA. This past summer there were free elections, in which the APRA party helped to elect Manuel Prado as president. Dr. Prado has already legalized the APRA party, but whether this decision, and others, will be respected by the army remains to be seen. The important fact is that under free vote, the electoral power is in the hands of the increasingly politically conscious masses—a new, real if unpredictable, factor in South American politics.
1 Quoted by permission of The Public Trustee and The Society of Authors, London.
To My Wife
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
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Copyright © V. S. Pritchett 1989
First published by the North Point Press, 1989
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