Christy

by Catherine Marshall

  “I’m sorry I overslept. Does Mr. Grantland teach at the Low Gap School?”

  “Oh no, that school’s closed. There were some old desks there; they said we could use them here.” She pointed out the window to a still unfinished building about a thousand yards distant. It was a rectangular building with an incomplete bell tower. “David can build anything he sets his hand to. He’s working on the steeple now.” That puppet’s smile again. Miss Grantland was trying to be nice but the smile had no real humor in it and so made me feel uncomfortable, patronized.

  “Then that will be the church as well as the school?”

  “That’s right. We haven’t the lumber and funds here to put up two buildings when one would do. This will be used for school on weekdays, church on Sundays.”

  “You’ve never had a school here before?”

  “No. This will be the first term. That’s why we need desks. Some of the men promised to help David haul them today. And believe me, he has to grab the help of these mountain men when he can get it.”

  It seemed that David Grantland slept in bachelor’s quarters, a tiny bunkhouse close to the creek, and took his meals at the big house, as did Miss Alice Henderson when she was in Cutter Gap. She did a lot of traveling, Miss Grantland said, between the three schools quite a distance apart.

  “David begged me to come and keep house for him. He said he couldn’t get along without me,” Miss Grantland told me proudly. “Course I know how he likes things fixed and all that. So I told him, yes, I’d come help him out for a while. David says maybe we can find a mountain woman to train as housekeeper. But I have doubts myself that anybody else can cook to suit him.” Her thumbs worked nervously as she spoke.

  Just then the side door banged and suddenly Mr. Grantland stood in the kitchen doorway. A young girl with a great shock of snarled red hair peered curiously from behind him. In long quick strides, he crossed the room to me, thrusting out his hand. “Miss Huddleston, great that you’re here. Oh—sorry. This is Ruby Mae Morrison. Ruby Mae’s staying with us for a while.”

  “Coffee, David?” His sister stood with the coffeepot poised.

  “Shouldn’t.” He glanced at me and smiled. “All right, Ida, maybe five minutes off. Let me wash my hands though.”

  The long legs strode to the kitchen sink; the booming voice never stopped. “Not much of a welcome yesterday, was it? Snowstorm, injured man. Total confusion.” He was back, easing his tall lean frame into the chair beside me. “Say, did you see me at all when you arrived?”

  “Just barely.”

  He reached for the sugar. “Thought so. You looked really done in. That was quite a walk you had,” he said, and his look held admiration.

  Mr. Grantland had black hair, carefully groomed, fine white even teeth, friendly brown eyes set wide apart. They were looking me over carefully, missing—I guessed—not much. And there was something about his nose—it looked a little different. I was to learn later that it had been broken by a baseball.

  The girl was still there, eager brown eyes on me. Ruby Mae was a buxom teenage girl whose abundant red hair looked as if it had not been combed in a long while. I learned later that her stepfather had ordered her out of the cabin in a fit of anger. Since she had had nowhere else to go, the mission had taken her in.

  Mr. Grantland’s five minutes stretched to ten. Then he left, saying that he and his helpers had another load of school desks and benches to pick up from the abandoned schoolhouse and that he would see me later on, after my visit with Miss Henderson.

  Already I could see that though the mission house was a palace compared to the Spencer cabin, it was still primitive. There was no electricity, no telephone, no plumbing. The house was a white frame three-story building with a screened porch on each side. Directly behind it loomed a mountain (I did not know the name of it yet), its base within a few feet of the back door. The house itself had been built on the top of the rising ground at the rear of a very large yard fenced across the front. This, together with the church-schoolhouse, a lattice-covered spring-house, a double outhouse (a very drafty outhouse indeed in this January weather), Mr. Grantland’s bunkhouse, and Miss Henderson’s cabin, comprised the mission buildings.

  At my knock, the door of Miss Alice Henderson’s cabin swung open and I was looking into her face. My immediate impression was of a woman of slightly above average height with clear, beautifully cut features. She started to greet me, but her sentence stopped midway. As she stared into my face, an odd look leapt into her eyes. For a flick of an instant she stood motionless, her hand still on the doorknob. Almost immediately she realized that she was leaving me standing in the cold. “I’m so sorry—” Whatever it was all about, it had left her flustered. “Forgive me. Do, please come in.”

  I was as surprised at the room before me as Miss Henderson had been by something about me. There was warmth and color and shine here: firelight gleaming on polished brass and the gray satin of pewter; firelight reflected on the well-scrubbed and waxed puncheon floor; the turkey reds and cobalt blues of what looked to be hand-loomed materials set off by old pine and cherry furniture. A bank of windows all across the back of the room let the outdoors in, with the winter landscape and the towering peaks like a gigantic mural.

  So this was Miss Henderson’s cabin! I had not realized how homesick I was until I felt relief pouring through me. Then there was some beauty and order in the Cove; it was not all plainness and squalor. Close on this reaction came the thought that only an extraordinary person could have created this room. And that person was standing beside me. I could get to know her.

  “Come sit down, child.” There was a trace of amusement in the voice. “First, let me hang up your coat. Here, come over by the fire. Down to ten above zero this morning. Does my cabin surprise you?”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to stare. After that nightmare scene yesterday, I wasn’t sure that I—belonged here. But this is so beautiful that I want to hug it—if you could hug a room. It’s like—well, like coming home.”

  “That’s the nicest compliment my cabin’s ever had. Here, sit in the red wing chair. One of the few pieces I brought from Ardmore.” Miss Henderson sat down opposite me, still a puzzled crease between her eyes as she regarded me.

  I noticed that she was wearing a straight blue woolen skirt and an immaculate white linen shirtwaist. To the waist was pinned a handsome brooch-watch with what looked like a family crest at the top, set with rubies and pearls. Mr. Pentland had said, “braided hair wound round and round her head like a crown.” He was right. There was something queenlike about her. The hair had once been quite blonde, but now was sprinkled with gray. But by far Miss Henderson’s most unusual feature was her eyes—fathomless deep gray in which there were traces of fatigue.

  “Miss Henderson, how is Mr. Allen?”

  “About seven this morning he opened his eyes, spoke to us, asked about his ailing hound-dog. I think he’s going to be all right.”

  I felt a great rush of affection toward Miss Henderson at this news. But then her first question seemed to open a gulf between us. “Now—tell me, Miss Huddleston, why did you come to Cutter Gap?”

  I watched one hand smoothing out a crease in her skirt. Surely she must be joking, I thought. But one look at her face told me that she was not. “Naturally, I thought Dr. Ferrand would have told you,” I answered. “I came to teach school, of course.”

  “Dr. Ferrand is a great man,” she answered calmly. “Only not too practical sometimes, no judge of the female. He sees in any girl or woman just what he wants to see. You’d be surprised at how little he told me about you. Anyway, what’s your version? Why are you here?”

  I found myself resisting the way the question was put. With a feeling of covering unnecessary ground, I told Miss Henderson about having heard Dr. Ferrand at Montreat present his case for the mountain people, about his pleading not so much for money as for volunteers, for the investment of lives. And about how I had been so moved that I had immediately volun
teered.

  “Looking back,” she asked me, “do you think you were carried away by the emotion of the moment?”

  “Somewhat, perhaps.” Though I did not understand why, now that I was here and Miss Henderson was probing my motives, I wanted to be honest with her. “Most girls my age can get carried away by an emotional appeal, I suppose.”

  “And Dr. Ferrand is eloquent,” Miss Henderson smiled.

  A smiley woman, Mr. Pentland had called her. All her lines are smile lines. “But I’ve had plenty of time to think it over between Montreat and now,” I told her. “Over four months. If I had wanted to back out, I could have.”

  “Why didn’t you? I would be interested in knowing.”

  “Because Dr. Ferrand made it sound as if you’re desperate for teachers. I’ve had a year and a semester of Junior College, enough to start teaching. Then—I’d like my life to count for something. You know, more than just staying home in Asheville, getting married, having babies.”

  The gray eyes were measuring me. Did I read cynicism in them? No, not that. But a down-to-earth quality that I was not accustomed to in people in religious work, too much realism for comfort.

  A silence more eloquent than any chatter filled the room. It had a quality about it that was new to me, different from the usual embarrassing lapses of conversation in society. The silence was certainly not for lack of something to say, nor from ill-humor or preoccupation. Miss Henderson was a Quaker, I remembered. Was this a Quaker silence?

  And in that creative and listening stillness, my mind went back to my life in Asheville. Teas and receptions and ladies’ genteel talk. Church on Sunday mornings. Shopping and dress fittings. Dance-parties and picnics in the summer. A good enough life, only what did it all mean? Where was it leading? There must be more to life than that. Or is there—for a woman?

  What was I born for, after all? I have to know. If I stayed at home going the round of the same parties, I don’t think I ever would know. Mother and father didn’t understand my eagerness, why I had wanted to come before I’d graduated. But I couldn’t wait forever . . .

  Then as if there had been no pause at all, Miss Henderson broke into my thoughts to ask gently, “So it seemed to you that teaching school here was the next step in making your life count?”

  “Well, yes. I mean I didn’t get any other ideas of anything I could do.” Does she mean to back me into a corner like this? She was the one who sent Mr. Allen to meet me in El Pano. Because of his accident, could she somehow resent me? No. Surely not! “But it isn’t just for me,” I added hastily. “It’s also for the children I’ll be teaching.” This sounded lame, not impressive even to me—as if I had wanted to leave home, and since the Cutter Gap job was the only escape route in sight, I had grabbed that.

  Miss Henderson made no comment, but I felt certain that the same thought was in her mind. Inside I was squirming under the level gaze from those gray eyes. Yet there was no malice in them, just a calm weighing and measuring and bringing me back, back, and then back again to simple basics. I longed to tell her about that feeling I’d had of some special mission to perform. But I can’t lay my fingers on what the mission is yet. So how can I talk about it? Maybe the feeling comes from reading too much poetry—or just because I’m young. But I don’t think so.

  I want my life to be full. I want to laugh—and love. Help others to the limit of my ability too. Those were the hopes that sent me on this wild fling into the mountains, weren’t they? Yes, surely that was it. But I said none of this to Alice Henderson.

  Then as abruptly as she had embarked on this series of uncomfortable questions Miss Henderson changed the subject. This was disconcerting too because it was obvious that she had by no means finished with the matter of my motives in coming to Cutter Gap.

  “You’ll need some facts about your new job,” she said brightly. “School opens on Monday next. Perhaps you’d like to know more about the people you’ll be working with, the mountain people too. Oh, by the way, they dislike being called ‘mountaineers.’ Better to say ‘mountain people’ or ‘highlanders.’ Also those at the mission call me ‘Miss Alice’—

  “With your coming, that gives us an official staff of three—David Grantland, you, and me, with Dr. Ferrand in over-all charge. David was appointed by Dr. Ferrand about four months ago with his special task to oversee building the church-schoolhouse. David just graduated from seminary. He’s a Pennsylvanian like me. Dr. Ferrand was traveling in the East and made a speech at his seminary.”

  “And Mr. Grantland volunteered? Sort of like I did?”

  “Well, it was a little different. It seems that the Seminary’s Committee on Social Concerns was trying to place graduates or graduate students in various sections of the country to find out where the biggest needs are. A pilot project, they call it. So David agreed to come here.”

  “I see . . .” I felt deflated. A pilot project sounded so much more official, so much more important than my vague yearning to do “something.”

  “How long have you been here, Miss Alice?”

  “I first came to the Great Smokies nine years ago. Almost ten now. My first school was at Big Lick Springs. That’s Sullivan County; the nearest railroad point is Fairview Flats.

  “Then two years after that, Cataleechie School got started. Wild scenery there, deep gorges. It’s very isolated. John Holcombe was over there on a hunting trip. He happened on the school one day and we met. Later, he and the Spencers joined in pleading with me to come and give their children a better school. Once I’d seen Cutter Gap, I loved it. I felt this was my spot.”

  “But how did you and Dr. Ferrand get together?”

  She laughed joyfully. “Oh, he came riding into my life one autumn day, not on a white charger but on a mule. I’ll never forget the picture he made: a man of almost seventy, heavy mustache, cropped sideburns, precisely clipped goatee. And his French ancestry showed. Those large black eyes and the hands that never stayed still when he talked.

  “An individualist, if ever I saw one. On top of all his medical training, he’d had a full theological course. Several years before, he’d established single-­handed what he called the American Inland Mission. His passion was—and still is—to start schools, churches, and orphanages in the remotest sections of the Blue Ridge, the Alleghenies, the Great Smokies, places where no one else will go.

  “His visit that autumn came at an opportune time. I’d begun to realize that I couldn’t carry on the work of three schools by myself and keep making trips to the outside world for financial support.

  “Dr. Ferrand was a gift from heaven to help us with this work,” Miss Alice went on. “So when I asked him, he finally agreed to take us under his wing.” She paused and that wonderful smile lighted her face. “Of course, the wing is broad. We don’t see much of him. Not nearly as much as we’d like to.”

  “Then you built your cabin after that?”

  “Yes. I had several reasons for putting up this place of my own. I wanted this to be a kind of demonstration cabin to show the people how to use native materials and their old crafts to create beauty.”

  “What a wonderful idea! You’ve succeeded too.”

  “Look, let me show you—” She rose to point out some of the stones in the chimney facing. “See that glistening mica in the rocks? And look, here are imbedded garnets—and rose quartz. Sometimes we even find sapphires.”

  She spoke knowingly of hewing and notching logs and of riving boards for shingles, of the ways she had adapted the “but-and-ben” of some of the people’s Scottish ancestors for the plan of her cabin—that was, one section of the house abutted on another section.

  “At only one thing did my mountain helpers balk like stubborn mules,” she told me. She gestured toward the bank of windows across the room. The morning sun was streaming in, laying patterns of light across the large oval braided rug. “So many windows were unheard of in these parts, I had to fight for my sunlight and my vista.”

  She laughed. “I fou
ght all right. You see, I wanted a quiet spot with a particular atmosphere, a sanctuary for me and for other people, where they could talk out some of their problems when they want to.

  “And believe me, there’s plenty for them to talk out. You see, the religious background of the mountain people is mostly the strict Calvinism of their Scotch-Irish forefathers. It has merits. Breeds steel in folks. Better than a wishy-washy religion that really has no convictions at all. But it’s bequeathed to these people a lot of heart scalds. You’ll see for yourself. Their Christianity is one of fear, of taboos—you can’t do this and you mustn’t do that. If you do, you’ll go to hell. You know the sort of thing.”

  “I hate a religion of fears,” I said with feeling. “I do too, and my parents before me. My father was a strict member of the Society of Friends up in Ardmore, Pennsylvania. But he had one favorite saying that sounds anything but strict. I grew up on it.” Here Miss Alice’s eyes took on a soft remembering look. “He was a tall man, stood so straight, but there were curves of fun around his mouth. ‘Before God,’ he would often say to me, ‘I’ve just one duty as a father. That is to see that thee has a happy childhood tucked under thy jacket.’ ”

  “I like that. And—did you have a happy childhood?”

  “The happiest imaginable. And you see, father was wise. He knew that I couldn’t have an earthly father who would provide joy all my days, and then be able to conceive of God as a stern judge wanting to take all my fun from me.” Miss Henderson sighed. “One of our tasks here is to show folks a God who wants to give them joy. How they need joy! They have such hard lives . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “I’m afraid the hardness is all I’ve seen so far,” I told her. She nodded understandingly. “At first I couldn’t see anything but the dirt and the poverty either. That’s what you’re really referring to. But then as I rode through the mountains during my first few months here, getting acquainted with the people, flashes of something else began to come through. It was like looking through a peephole in the wall that closes on the past, catching delightful glimpses of earlier ways.”