Christy

by Catherine Marshall

  “I know. And he has his own brand of chivalry. And I like him too. Yet I’m serious, quite serious.”

  “But Dr. MacNeill, you said everybody in the Cove takes sides. Why wouldn’t the squire want anybody who’s guilty on the other side from his family and friends to be brought to justice?”

  “Because he subscribes wholeheartedly to the view that our family quarrels are our own business, to be resolved in our own way outside the courts. If he didn’t feel that way, he’d never have gotten elected—and then re-elected seventeen times.”

  “I never heard anything so tangled.”

  “Yet I haven’t told you a fraction of all the ins and outs.” The doctor walked over to look out the front window. “I think we began this conversation when you challenged me in a pert, feminine way about my lack of reforming zeal about sanitation and superstitions. If you’d really like to see some reform, stopping the hate and feuding and killing is a fertile field for your mission.”

  There was a note of something close to contempt in his voice. He had said “your mission” as if it was far removed from his sphere of activity.

  “I take it that ‘thou shalt not kill’ is authorization enough,” he went on. “Besides, I agree with you that it would sure be pleasant to spend some time teaching mothers how to take care of babies instead of probing for bullets in lungs, suturing slashed abdomens, operating on eyes half gouged out.”

  While he heated some coffee in an old white enamel-ware coffeepot and we drank it, the doctor talked on about some of the families in the Cove, telling me story after story, some of them gruesome, many of them funny. When we heard a light rap on the door and David walked in, I was startled that so much time had passed.

  After I had dressed again in my own clothes and as we were leaving Dr. MacNeill’s cabin, David said, “Theo will mind me better, so I’ll ride him and you take Prince.”

  “But—”

  “No buts. You’ll be safe enough if you ride astride. No, not a word, I insist. Safety before modesty.”

  “But David, I’ve got to say it, this isn’t a split skirt—”

  “Doesn’t matter. Anyway, I already know what a woman’s leg looks like.”

  Actually I did feel more sure of myself not riding sidesaddle. We got back across Big Spoon Creek without any problems and onto the trail for home.

  Along the edge of the ridge, the path was wide enough that David and I could ride side by side. I was letting David do most of the talking; my thoughts were still on what Dr. MacNeill had told me. How could the Cutter Gap that the doctor had pictured be the same place that Dr. Ferrand had talked about that day from the platform in Montreat? What did Miss Alice think about all of these murders? And how much of all this did David know? He had seemed so friendly with Uncle Bogg. Did he know about the old man’s obstructing justice? Finally I broke into my own thoughts to ask David.

  “I know enough,” was his answer. “I haven’t said much because I didn’t want to scare you. For your comfort, those who mind their own business and don’t take sides are usually safe enough. But the Doc is right about the mission’s responsibility. My mind’s been wrestling with this. I may have to rip open the subject from the pulpit soon.”

  “But that won’t exactly be minding your own business. That could be—well—”

  “Dangerous? Sure. I know.”

  “David, about Dr. MacNeill . . . I was glad of the chance to know him better this afternoon. But after all his explanations, I still don’t see how he can go in and out of these cabins year after year and leave them in as bad shape as always. He’s a strange one. I don’t think I like him.”

  “That’s not fair, Christy. You women judge too quickly. Don’t be fooled about the Doc because he doesn’t wear a white shirt and a collar and tie. I’ve spent some evenings with him, talking. Good talk, too. His ancestors were as distinguished a family as ever came out of Scotland—the MacNeills of the Island of Barra. Their ancestral castle is still there. Pry the story out of the doctor some time—or get Alice Henderson to tell you.”

  Four of Miss Ida’s hot buckwheat cakes, six—David was enjoying his breakfast. I poured him a second cup of coffee. “When you have something important to say to a man,” my mother had always advised, “never say it to a hungry one. Wait until he’s had a good meal.” Well then, now should be the moment.

  “David,” I plunged in, “I’ve gotten notice of some shipments at Lyleton and El Pano—for the mission, I mean.” I tried to sound casual.

  “What kind of shipments?” His black eyebrows lifted. Already he was wary.

  This was hard. For days now I had been trying to think of a way to soften the news, but I couldn’t figure out any way at all to make the shipment of a concert grand piano and a Harvester wagon sound—well, usual. “Oh, just a few things.” I looked away from him, traced the pattern in the tablecloth with the tip of one finger. “A wagon and uh—a grand piano.”

  “A what?”

  “No need to get upset, David.”

  “Now let’s begin all over.” He pushed his chair back from the table, crossed his legs and looked at me. “Will you get that pleading look out of those big eyes of yours? Now what-in-thunder is this about?”

  “Sort of a long story. I got the idea of writing to some businessmen, a nice letter, really nice, telling them about the mission and giving them a chance to help by donating products rather than money.”

  “ ‘Giving them a chance,’ she says. That’s turning things around.”

  “But,” I protested, “how could I know that so many of them would respond? I never expected the Lyon and Healy Company to come through. And if they did, I was thinking of an upright, not a grand piano. Let alone a concert grand.”

  David grimaced, put his head in his hands, laughed shakily, and then started probing and prodding and pulling the truth out of me bit by bit. “How many letters have you written, Christy?”

  “Thirty-eight.”

  “How many replies have you gotten so far?”

  “Ah, let me think—twenty-one.”

  “And are all of these firms donating something?”

  “All but one. One flat refusal.”

  “I see. What kind of stuff are they sending other than wagon beds and concert grand pianos?”

  “Oh, mattresses, soap, paints, windowshades, soup.”

  Poor David got his answers soon enough. For the next few weeks, hauling freight out from El Pano took most of his time. Three bedsteads arrived, then some towels and sheets. David had to borrow a team of oxen to get the wagon sent by the International Harvester Company out to the Cove. Yet the wagon proved to be invaluable. It arrived in the mission yard piled high with cartons and boxes.

  Soon Miss Ida was complaining loudly that she could not get around the kitchen because of the cases of soup, evaporated milk, baked beans, and cocoa that had piled up. “We have enough Pincine baking powder and Plymouth Rock gelatin and Wizard furniture polish to last the rest of our lives. Miss Huddleston has been most efficient. Too bad while she was about it, she didn’t ask for a warehouse to store the stuff. David,” she fumed, “you’ve got to find somewhere else to dump all this paraphernalia.”

  But the back porch was already heaped high with the cartons of pins, insulators, and the wire from the telephone company. A lot of wire was needed for seven miles. Besides, David would pay no attention to what he called under his breath his sister’s “picayune complaints.” He escaped the tension in the house by staying busy each day hauling out more freight.

  Then the piano arrived, the largest and most elaborate concert grand made by Lyon and Healy. It took two pairs of oxen hitched to the new wagon to pull it. David and three of the mountain men spent two days of hard work getting the huge instrument over the rutted roads across the mountains. But the piano was given a place of honor in the big, almost empty living room and was to prove a delight to all of us.

  At supper the day the piano arrived, Miss Ida commented waspishly, “Christy Huddl
eston, you’re sure going to get the beggar’s reward when you get to heaven.”

  David laughed but I noticed that Miss Alice did not. “As a matter of fact, Christy,” she said seriously, “Dr. Ferrand doesn’t like begging.”

  Miss Ida pursed her lips primly as if to say, “I told you so!”

  “Now’s the time to explain the doctor’s philosophy of money and fund-raising,” Miss Alice went on, not noticing her at all. “David, you should know this too. He loathes even the term ‘raising money.’ Whenever he makes a talk about the work—and believe me, that’s usually several times a week—he won’t even let anyone take a collection afterwards. The point is, Dr. Ferrand won’t accept any money unless he knows the individual has had inner direction to give it. He feels that money dunned out of people won’t be blessed for the work anyway.”

  These were new ideas to me but I respected them. In fact, in the light of such a philosophy of giving, now I thought I saw what was wrong with the never-ending pleas for funds from charitable organizations and pulpits: most of the time these solicitors were trying to pry money out of people by riding roughshod over their individual right of choice.

  But Miss Alice continued, “I believe each person has something special he’s meant to do. That being the case, surely we have no right to foist ‘causes’—even our favorite ones—only present them. Dr. Ferrand believes—and I agree—that only one motive is good enough to warrant giving: because the self, without pressure, freely chooses to make the gift.”

  As we left the table, Miss Alice took my arm and led me to the far corner of the living room. “Christy, as much as we need these supplies, I’m forced to say this to you. All those letters you wrote could place the mission in a bad light. And Dr. Ferrand does have the right to be consulted about policy and procedure. So do the rest of us on the staff. I honestly don’t think this going ahead on your own was even good teamwork.”

  I nodded, gulped back several explanations, but I knew she was right. I did sometimes pull away and go running off on my own. David’s attitude about the telephone underscored her point on teamwork. If he was expected to string the wires and install the telephones, he felt that I might at least have talked it over with him before writing the Bell Company. On my side, I had just thought that if David could build a schoolhouse-church, he would have no problem installing one or two little telephones.

  “It has to be connected up, you know. Two ends, something to carry the voice.” There was mild irritation and a trace of sarcasm in David’s voice. “The wire has to be strung across Pebble Mountain, then across Coldsprings Mountain—that’s even higher—over Allen’s Branch, across the French Broad River. How do I get the wire across a river? Tell me that.”

  Woefully, I acknowledged that I hadn’t the least idea. I had been too eager, astonishingly impulsive and thoughtless. After my rebuke from Miss Alice I was abject about it. But that did not stop the boxes and barrels from continuing to arrive.

  Evening after evening we pulled down the new shades and unpacked some of the plunder. At least “plunder” was the way Ruby Mae thought of it; she was certain that Christmas had come to stay.

  One evening it was several boxes of secondhand books and clothing from my Asheville church. Miss Alice was there because she was more tolerant of this type of contribution—probably, I thought, because she was accustomed to missionary barrels. Ruby Mae was sitting cross-legged on the floor, her brown eyes dancing with excitement. Miss Ida was close to an oil lamp, darning her brother’s socks.

  At my insistence, David unpacked the books first, and eagerly we scanned the titles. On the whole, they were fine; most could be used at the school. What a relief to have some books! Then David got the lid pried off the first barrel and began pulling out the secondhand clothes. He held up a party dress of stiff gray silk, heavily beaded.

  “Oh-h! It’s beau-ti-ful.” Ruby Mae reached out eager fingers for it. She held the dress in front of her and began dancing around the room, her long red hair flying.

  “Perfect for hoeing—or carrying water from the spring,” was David’s dry retort. “Look what we have next—” and he pulled out a pink corset with many stays and long strings. We women chose to ignore that, but David, teasingly, draped it prominently over the edge of the barrel. Next came a swallowtail coat and several voluminous nightshirts and then a series of ladies’ hats. One was black velvet shaped like a gigantic boat, heavy with once-white aigrette feathers. Another was a soiled pink, layer upon layer of ribbon, the whole swathed in yards of mauve veiling.

  “Now this one is really packed. You should see the tissue around it. Must be valuable.” And David twirled on his finger a natural straw wreathed in red roses, wired so that a cluster of the roses towered high above the hat.

  I was feeling increasingly let down. Apparently in my letters to my Asheville friends I had not gone into enough detail about the kind of clothes to send; I had thought they understood that the mountain folk had no need for such dress-up clothes.

  David raised his head out of the barrel and looked at me. “Hey, Christy, come on now, don’t take it so seriously. Here, model this millinery,” and he shoved the hat down on my hair.

  The brim was over my eyes and I could feel the tower of roses vibrating in the air. It was a relief to laugh and soon all of us—including Miss Alice—were caught up in the hilarity. Each item out of the barrels was more ludicrous than the last: a muff, half-eaten by moths; a ruffled nightcap; a pillow-top which had been a souvenir of Niagara Falls; ladies’ chemises, and men’s vests, a lot of them.

  I had pushed the hat with the roses back on my head, but each time I moved, the tower of roses fluttered and swayed. “Whatever can we do with these?” I asked counting the vests, all eleven of them.

  “After all, men’s stomachs do have to be kept warm,” Miss Alice said. “I’ll predict these will be known locally as ‘wes’coats’ or maybe ‘vestees.’ ”

  Miss Ida snorted. “Four quilt pieces from the front of each vest, that’s all they’re good for.”

  The third barrel was better. It seemed full of children’s shoes. At last I’d be able to get some of those bare feet in my classroom shod. But mixed in with the sensible ones were a few ladies’ shoes with high heels and very pointed toes, some of them satin.

  Before we parted for the night, we decided that it would not do to give away the clothes. “There’s a strong mountain code,” Miss Alice explained. “No mountain person wants to be beholden.” Here she looked directly at me, hoping to drive her point home. “Any mountain man has contempt for anyone who won’t let him earn his own way.”

  This posed a dilemma. Finally David had an idea. “Why not sell the clothes—priced very low, of course?” His thought was that we could set up store in his little house down by the creek one afternoon a week. We could charge something like seventy-five cents for a good suit or dress; twenty-five cents for a blouse; five cents for a vest; fifty cents for a pair of shoes. And since even small amounts of cash were so short in the Cove, we could take produce in exchange when it was necessary.

  Ruby Mae was given permission to set the mountain grapevine in motion with the news of the store. It caused immediate excitement. To our astonishment, the first items to be bought with the tiny hoardings of cash or surplus food were the ones we had thought most useless. Every woman wanted a fancy city dress, every man a vest to wear on top of faded and patched overalls. Within a week after the store was opened, Bob Allen was wearing a swallowtailed coat as he tended mill, and high-heel satin shoes had been filled with sand or pebbles from creek banks and were being used as door stops in many a mountain cabin.

  Every Saturday for the next three months we kept store and on the whole it was a great success. The only problem was that soon the mission was drowning in sorghum and sauerkraut, the two items which had rapidly become the principal media of exchange. There were nights when David waited until everyone was in bed and then stealthily got rid of gallons of sauerkraut by burying it in the bac
k yard.

  Every Monday morning of each successive week handed me problems in schoolteaching for which no Teacher’s Training Course could ever have prepared me. First of all, strangely enough, were the smells. What was I to do about the body odors of children who were disinclined to take any baths during the cold months; who, if they owned any underwear, usually had it sewn on for the winter?

  Whenever my pupils and I could stand the cold, we would conduct school with as many windows up as possible. That helped. But on some days the wintry blasts sweeping down from the mountains would whistle through the Cove, shaking the frame building as if it had been a rat in the teeth of some giant terrier, quivering the timbers, shivering us, making it impossible to open the windows.

  Of a morning while I was dressing, I came to recognize these bad days by the truculent whistling of the wind: we would have to huddle close to the stove that day. So I would prepare by carrying up my sleeve a handkerchief heavily saturated with perfume. Then when one of my more difficult pupils had to be near me to recite, I could always pull the handkerchief out and dab at my nose. I hoped that none of the children guessed my strategy.

  Over and over I rued that too-sensitive nose of mine. Many an evening in my bedroom as I was preparing next day’s lessons, some incident would rise to haunt me: how I had backed away from Larmie Holt when I should have hovered close to check his work. There had been that certain look in the child’s eyes, puzzled, a little hurt. Lannie had not understood. How could he!

  Then I would chew my pencil and walk the floor pondering my dilemma. I wondered how others trapped in similar situations had managed. All those foreign missionaries, hundreds of them, must have had it far worse than I. Yet I had never heard any returned missionary speak of grappling with poor sanitation and uncleanliness. Perhaps they considered it too delicate a subject to discuss. And then—in desperation—I would feel like crying out, “Oh God, it might be funny, but it isn’t, really it isn’t. Ple-ease—change my nose, or help me get the children cleaned up in a hurry.”