On Snowden Mountain

by Jeri Watts

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Acknowledgments

  AUNT PEARL WAS PUNCHING our doorbell and calling out, “Open this door.”

  For a moment, I saw a spark in Mama’s eyes. The spark she’d lost since my father joined up to go “beat the tar out of Adolf Hitler.”

  I felt a spark too — a spark of fear. Aunt Pearl had visited us once before, and she’d been quite a force to reckon with — I questioned the desperation that had driven me to ask her for help. But as I walked to the door, I looked back at my mother, a whisper of herself, both physically and emotionally, and I knew that it had been the right thing to do.

  Besides, I didn’t have any other choice. At twelve years old, what was I going to do? I’d burned every pot and pan in our home, I’d used up every bit of food from the grocery and they wouldn’t deliver any more on credit, and I had no other adults to turn to. I had no one and nowhere to go for help but to a family member I had met just once — a family member my father didn’t like much and whom my mother had run away from as soon as she could. It seemed when my father left for war, my mother left too.

  I pushed my fear down and opened the door.

  Aunt Pearl bustled right in. She was tall and bulky, just as I remembered, wearing some hideous dress of indistinguishable style. (My mother raised me to place great store in fashion. It obviously mattered little to Aunt Pearl.) She stood before Mama and took her pulse. I suppose that’s what she did, because she picked up Mama’s thin wrist with her beefy hand and briefly looked at the sensible wristwatch she wore.

  “We will go to Snowden,” she said.

  I blinked and found my voice. “No.” I swallowed. “I mean, actually, I thought you could help here.”

  She continued to hold Mama’s wrist. She said nothing but looked up at me in disdain. I’d remembered that look — and the pinched nose that went with it — correctly.

  I went on babbling. “I have school. My books.”

  Aunt Pearl pulled Mama out of her chair, pushed her up the stairs, and began to pack my mother’s clothes. The woman who was my aunt spoke to us both. “We will go home. To Snowden.”

  And so, in early September 1942, we did.

  THE JOURNEY TOOK A LIFETIME, or at least it seemed that way. My world had just collapsed.

  I’d expected Aunt Pearl to help me there, in Baltimore. I’d expected . . . Oh, I’d expected I don’t know what. I had had time to prepare for my father leaving. He told my mother and me he was planning to volunteer; he showed us his uniform; we had parties in the neighborhood; he showed me newspaper articles about Hitler and the WAR (he always spoke of it as if it were in all capital letters).

  With Aunt Pearl, our departure was a whirl; things moved fast, slow, then fast again. I found myself making comparisons about things that mattered little but would have mattered a great deal to my mother if she’d been acting like my mother anymore. But she wasn’t.

  We caught a train to Lexington, Virginia, a nothing of a town compared to Baltimore. We spent the night there, in the most uncomfortable bed, which we all three shared, a difficult task, since Aunt Pearl took up more than her share. That bed smelled funny too, like old soap. I wasn’t allowed any bedtime routines before going to sleep, as Aunt Pearl immediately turned off the light. I understood Mama and Aunt Pearl were probably tired, especially since Mama looked tired all the time, but I wished I could have read for a little while. Too bad I had no books.

  As I waited for sleep on that lumpy mattress, trapped between the stranger my mother had become and the stranger who was my aunt, I tried to comfort myself by thinking of good memories; instead, I fought with the memories of the past few months.

  I thought of my shoe salesman father, who didn’t have to go to war, as it said in the letter I’d found squirreled in the depths of the closet. The letter told him that as the “sole provider of a minor and an unhealthy dependent,” he would not be expected to serve.

  Yet he’d volunteered to go, proud to serve in his sharply creased private’s uniform. Gone after a whirlwind of parties and send-offs for “my hero,” as Mama called him. I wondered if that “unhealthy dependent” meant Mama, because she had had to go away for a few days the previous year for some “fresh air,” days when I’d stayed with my friend Peggy and her family.

  When Mama returned, nobody, not even Peggy, would jump rope or play tag or jacks with me anymore.

  That’s when Mama told me books could be my best friends. She wouldn’t let me read Nancy Drew or Lad: A Dog. She wanted me to read important books that made me look smart. I carried them around to make her happy, but I didn’t even understand the first pages. Still, holding them made me feel close to her.

  Finally, I felt myself drifting off to sleep in that crowded bed, and I surrendered to it.

  In the morning, we learned that the train track at Balcony Downs had been washed out by mud. Aunt Pearl wasn’t willing to wait for the repairs.

  “Perhaps you could borrow a car?” I asked.

  Aunt Pearl looked at me with a stone face. “Can’t drive a car. Besides, you’d get sick. I get sick in cars on that mountain, and I’ve been living around here forever.” She tapped her lips with her right index finger, then nodded. “We’ll go by river.”

  In no time at all, Aunt Pearl had us bundled onto what she called a packet boat, a long, low thing that loaded at a dock perched on the Maury River. She counted out the money carefully. And she managed the narrow walkway onto the boat with amazing dexterity; she refused the assistance of the men with my mother and did it all with confident strides.

  Our pathetic pile of luggage was dumped unceremoniously in a heap, and we huddled around it. Aunt Pearl held on to Mama until she could deposit her on some sort of barrel beside my small black bag.

  “Keep your eyes open, Ellen. Not many packet boats left.”

  My glance took in the vessel. With its peeling paint and weathered wood, it did little to demonstrate why there should be any of its kind left.

  I sniffed. “It stinks.”

  Aunt Pearl looked off into the distance. “I don’t smell anything.”

  I sniffed again. There was a familiarity to the odor, and I understood it wasn’t the boat that produced the pungent smell but rather the men who worked it.

  “This kind of boat seems like something out of the frontier days.”

  Aunt Pearl nodded. “An old-fashioned mode of travel, true. The mail’s delivered to Snowden on this.”

  I glanced at the burlap bags stamped U.S. MAIL.

  “The last mail truck burned up its motor on Snowden Mountain. Besides, these men need the business.”

  They may have needed the business, but they seemed in no hurry to get it done. I expected them to take their roles as mailmen more seriously. Our mailman in Baltimore always walked quickly. But perhaps it was to relieve his shoulder from the heavy pack instead of wanting to take pride in the delivery service.

  “Look around you, Ellen, and see the beauty of Virginia. You’re in the Blue Ridge, and you’ll not find such magnificence in Baltimore.”

  I looked then at the fat green trees lining the banks, the boulders sitting like lazy stone frogs, the mountains rising beside us as the Maury melded into the James. The water was turgid and brown, water that looked tired and slow in the last of summer’s heat.

  Finally, we reached Snowden. The docking area was dim, but A
unt Pearl snorted at me when I asked about lights. “Child, you’ll find no electric anything out this way. Life here is very different from Baltimore.”

  She was right. It was “very different” from Baltimore. There were no streetlights, so velvet darkness wrapped around us that night — a dark of such depth I felt it cloaking me so tightly that I was strangling in it. So soft, so smooth — and yet so deep as to swallow you.

  The men unloaded our bags, and we stumbled off. One bag for each of us, but I had to carry all three since Aunt Pearl had all she could do to guide Mama, so I swallowed my protest and hiked up the bags.

  After climbing the steps up the bank of the James River, we crossed the train tracks, which caused Mama to fall flat on her face and proved our biggest hurdle. We then walked almost soundlessly down some sort of path until I heard Aunt Pearl mutter, “Home at last, Martha. We’ll just get you inside.”

  I lifted my head and got a glimpse of it.

  Even in the dark, I could make out Aunt Pearl’s home, a small white frame house perched on the edge of a looming darkness she called a mountain.

  As we arrived, Mama required pushes and pulls from Aunt Pearl to climb the stairs of the porch, and Mama had no smile or glimmer for the house she’d also once known as home.

  She trudged to a room on the first floor with a closed door she waited in front of, a door I opened for her. Then she sat in a hard chair placed beside a window and looked out into the empty darkness.

  “This was her room,” Aunt Pearl said. She pulled down the bedcovers so Mama could retire for the night and then shoved me out the door. “Upstairs and to the right. I’ll show you around tomorrow.”

  I mounted the steps wearily and entered a small, plain room. All I could see from the window, in the darkness, was what I took to be a wall of mountain. I lay across a single bed without removing my clothes. What had I done? Here we were, in the care of a gruff stranger. Mama never talked about Aunt Pearl, about growing up here, about anything in the past. In my efforts to take care of Mama, I’d sent a telegram with repercussions I still didn’t quite understand. I put my face in the pillow and took a deep breath. It smelled foreign, and yet I knew the smell; it matched the rigid, stiff feeling of the sheets. These were sheets and pillowcases dried outside and not used often, saved for company.

  My mother once said, “We had to hang out clothes to dry when I was a kid. You’re lucky, Ellen. We have a dryer.” She’d buried her face in the sheets and continued, “Everything’s so much softer this way and smells like home.”

  She was right, I guess. These didn’t smell like home. But I knew if I said that to Aunt Pearl, she’d think I was a spoiled girl — and maybe I was. I closed my eyes and felt tears slide down my cheeks. It wasn’t really the sheets from the dryer I was missing.

  The next morning, I had to hurry to the outhouse to relieve myself. In the daylight, I could see the small building perched at the edge of the woods, a ring of small birch-like trees bordering it. I knew about birch trees. Daddy loved them and drew pictures that always included them. These weren’t his beloved birches, though, and I couldn’t remember exactly what they were from Miss Welch’s leaf-and-tree study in third grade. Still, they were similar to Daddy’s trees, and that was going to have to be enough. I took comfort in them; I had to.

  The back of the house, with a sprawling porch spread across it, stood twenty yards or so from the woods. I didn’t bother to look at things too closely, though. This might be the place I had to live so my mother could be taken care of, but it would never be my home. I would not allow it to be. The less I looked, the less I could like.

  Of course, I couldn’t help but notice the enormous mountain that rose in the woods. So my nighttime guess about the view out the window had been correct. Aunt Pearl lived at the base of a mountain.

  I went back inside and found Aunt Pearl preparing pancakes in the kitchen. “Your mother won’t be joining us for breakfast,” she said. “She needs more rest.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Should I set the table?”

  She pointed with her head toward a cabinet, and I opened the dingy wooden door to discover china plates of the most exquisite colors. They looked like pictures I’d seen in a book about China — delicate hues of green and gold, graceful willow trees depicted, scalloped edges like shells from the sea.

  “Oh,” I cried, “they’re lovely.” I swallowed, willfully stopping myself from enjoying the plates and running my fingers around their edges, as I wanted to. I glanced around for sturdier, less valuable dishes. Aunt Pearl looked at me. I said, “In Baltimore, we used our good china only for holidays. We had another set for every day.”

  Aunt Pearl sniffed. “Those are what we use every day.” She loaded a steaming stack of four beautifully golden, crisp-edged pancakes onto the plate I’d hurriedly put in front of my place. “Eat up while they’re warm.”

  How could Aunt Pearl, who had no job that I knew of, afford plates like those? Maybe, I thought, she was a spy for the Germans. Like Mata Hari in the First World War. But, no, Mata Hari garnered information with her looks. I stole another glance at Aunt Pearl, with her wide hips and sturdy calves. No. Maybe Aunt Pearl sold illegal things. Nylons and tires, things made of materials that were supposed to go to the war effort. She could be a supplier — I’d read about them in the newspaper. They were bad people, and they only hurt our men fighting overseas.

  I pushed my pancakes through the sea of syrup I’d poured, trying to see the graceful willow emerge from beneath the steaming cakes. I thought again of my home in Baltimore, of my books and trousers left unceremoniously, and I knew I’d ask no questions, keep no eye out about money or supplying goods. The less I knew, the less I could care. “What time does school start?” I asked. “I don’t want to be late on my first day.”

  “No school yet. It’s only early September.”

  I swallowed a bite, and it seemed to grow and swell, clogging my throat. I took a swallow of milk to force it down. “My school in Baltimore starts right after Labor Day.”

  “Baltimore, Baltimore,” Aunt Pearl snapped. “Things aren’t done around here the way they are in Baltimore. You’d best get used to that, Ellen.”

  I put my fork on the edge of the plate, the silver handle propped carefully, just out of reach of the waves of syrup.

  Aunt Pearl rose and scraped her chair against the floor. She didn’t look at me, but her voice sounded a trifle sorry. “The schoolhouse is down the road a piece, in the village itself. I suppose you could visit it today, if you’ve a mind to. Teacher might be there, getting ready.”

  In Baltimore, I loved school: the sturdy brick building with seventeen steps that led into the long front hall; the tidy classrooms, one for each grade, and each with the required picture of a severe-looking George Washington. His squinting eyes followed me wherever I moved in the room, and yet strangely, I felt watched over in a comforting way. Baltimore had smiling teachers who, it seemed, spent their lives at school so that graded papers could be returned the next day.

  In the mountains, according to Aunt Pearl, I’d best prepare for a “different experience.” She warned me there was no separate school building. The classes met in the wooden church, reached by mounting two plank steps. Snowden had lost their preacher about twenty years before; the circuit never got around to replacing him.

  I closed my eyes to imagine. The one classroom, then, might be messy with ancient hymnals that smelled like old women and dried, withered sermons the preacher left for the congregation after his preaching but no one ever read. It might have no pictures at all. Miss Spencer, the teacher, would be old and tired, and she wouldn’t even have paper for the students; they’d have to use slates. No imagining required there; Aunt Pearl had told me for sure about that.

  She was right. Miss Spencer was stacking slates when I wandered in. She didn’t look up, just kept stacking. There was a hump in her back, not deforming, but large enough to notice, and she looked . . . gray. It wasn’t that she was wearing gray cl
othes or that her hair was gray or even that her skin had that pasty gray look some people have. No, she just exuded gray.

  “How do you do?” I asked, trying to sound casual. I didn’t want to seem too desperate. “I’m Ellen Hollingsworth. I’m from Baltimore and —”

  She cut me off, though not unkindly. “I know who you are. Around these parts, there aren’t many secrets. When Pearl left, after your telegram, talk swirled around here like a hurricane-force wind. You’ll find your business isn’t yours for long.” She shrugged with a “there you have it” attitude that immediately put me off.

  “You’re staying with Pearl Simmons. She said as how you were a school type.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I couldn’t imagine my aunt Pearl saying that to anyone, when she would have said it or to whom. But I was not about to ask this woman, who had immediately made me feel like fingernails were being dragged on a blackboard.

  She continued talking at me, now moving the stacked slates to a space in a cabinet. “School won’t be starting up for another week or so. Harvesting’s almost finished, but there won’t be enough children to begin for at least another week. I just thought I’d tidy up a bit.”

  “I’ll help, if you’d like.”

  She nodded, then handed me a rag and a bucket of warm water. “The benches could use some cleaning.”

  By lunchtime, I’d scrubbed my hands raw. Only half of the benches were cleaned.

  “New to labor, I see,” Miss Spencer said. “No matter. Pearl will get you trained.” She took the scrubbing cloth. “Go on home now. You can come tomorrow morning if you’ve a mind to.”

  I had a mind to. Why wouldn’t I? Anything was better than waiting for Mama to find her way out of her room, waiting to see the hollow look leave her eyes.

  Over the following days, Miss Spencer and I fell into a routine. She gave me mindless chores to do, chores that required muscle and time; she worked on lesson plans and put her books to order. The storage area set aside for the school things had been raided by some raccoons over the summer, and Miss Spencer spent hours making sure pages eaten from one book could be found in another, so students could find the whole story if they shared.