Christy

by Catherine Marshall

  “But I haven’t finished about the still. There’s another fact you must have, David. The second blockader is Tom McHone.”

  My thoughts raced. Opal McHone’s husband. Uncle Bogg’s own son. “Does Opal know that?” I asked.

  “She suspects, I think, but she doesn’t want to face it. Up to now Tom has stayed very clear of all stilling.”

  “Then why now?” David’s voice was sharp.

  “Because since the baby’s birth, Opal’s had anemia. It’s serious, bordering on pernicious anemia. She needs expensive medicine, good food. As their doctor, Tom will let me supply the medicine, but as for money for ‘brought-on’ food ‘I’m obleeged to ye, Doc, but I don’t choose’ is his final word.

  “You’ve never seen pride until you’ve met the fierce passion for personal independence in these folks. Believe me, it didn’t just happen that the first Declaration of Independence came out of the Appalachians’ Mecklenburg County more than a year before the 4th of July one we celebrate.”

  The doctor ran his hand through his hair, so curly at the top and on the ends. “So—Tom’s in a box. I know what he’s up against. Back in these mountains there’s only one real source of money and that’s the sale of good whiskey to outlanders. Tom loves Opal and he’d like to keep her above ground. Can you blame him? I’m sorry, folks, but I just couldn’t see a man like that turned in.”

  There was silence while we assimilated this latest news. Finally David said, “I respect your friendship with the McHones and your compassion, Doctor, but I think your conclusion’s wrong. Selling blockade whiskey isn’t the only way of getting food and medicine. Why didn’t Tom come to us for help?”

  “Too proud. That’s not the way of these folks. They want to solve their problems themselves. Besides, how much cash do you have at the mission? They know what your salaries are.”

  “What about Miss Alice?” I asked.

  “Alice Henderson understands the independent spirit of these people. She’s never given them handouts. Not a person would ask her to. No, the problem goes deeper—and farther back.”

  Dr. MacNeill had gotten to his feet, was pacing up and down the little room. David still sat on the floor, his knees drawn up in front of him. His brown eyes were wary now and skeptical as they followed the doctor back and forth across the creaking floor.

  “Yes, farther back. In fact, do either of you realize how far back? 1912 is faced with precisely the dilemma of 1794.”

  David looked impatient and opened his mouth to interrupt.

  “No David, hear me out on this,” Dr. MacNeill growled at him. “It’s important. Ever hear of the Whiskey Rebellion?”

  “Yes—vaguely—in some history course or other—”

  “I bring it up because if Tom McHone was of a mind to, he could stage his own whiskey rebellion for the same reason as the frontiersmen did. Nothing’s changed—except that the government has steadily raised the excise tax on whiskey.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t remember my history too well,” I said apologetically. “Would you mind—?”

  “History lesson aside, Doc, what does that have to do with the present problem?”

  “It has to do with the solution to the present problem. I don’t think we can work out a real solution until you have all the facts. I’ll make it brief.

  “In the old days there weren’t any roads into these mountains, just trails. As you’ve both seen, the roads aren’t much better yet. The mountain farms never have produced much and there was no way to get what they did produce to market. The most a pack horse could carry was about eight bushels of grain, corn, or rye. Believe me, that wouldn’t buy much sugar, salt, gunpowder or calico.

  “But if you made the eight bushels of grain into liquor in a little homemade still on your own land, the same horse or mule could carry sixteen gallons of liquor—which doubled or trebled the money on your grain. The mountain men simply couldn’t figure out any other way to get even a subsistence income.

  “The seaboard farmers have always had a big advantage over the highlanders. During the American Revolution they got rich from scarcity and high prices. But then the treasury of the new nation was broke, so Hamilton, then Secretary of the Treasury, pushed through a stiff excise tax on liquor (over the sharp protests of Jefferson, Gallatin, and others) to replenish the coffers. The Colonies had never had that tax before, and of all forms of taxation, the excise has always been most loathed by the English, the Scottish, and the Irish.

  “Anyway, to the highlanders it seemed grossly unfair: the seaboard farmers could go right on taking their grain to market without one cent of tax, while in effect, the new excise levied a heavy tax on the mountain men’s grain. So they rose to protest, and that’s what the history books call the Whiskey Rebellion.

  “These Cove people don’t see anything criminal about a little homemade brew. Try and understand their point of view. The know-how has been handed down for centuries. During all that time, whiskey has been used as their most common drug to doctor everything from colds to snake bite to heart trouble. They figure that it’s their grain that goes into the whiskey. They grew it. They got together a few pieces of copper tubing and some other odds and ends and put together a little contraption on their land. To them that’s no more morally wrong than their wives making wild strawberry preserves in their kitchens or soap from lye drippings in their yards.

  “But that aside, the point I want to make is, the problem of cash income for the necessities in the mountains never has been solved. Tom McHone’s predicament just dramatizes it all over again.”

  The doctor’s words stopped abruptly. He sat down again on the bed, calmly took out his tobacco pouch, and began filling his pipe.

  It was David who finally broke the silence. “All right, Doctor”—he sounded a bit rueful—“you’ve made valid points. I can’t agree that moonshining sidesteps all moral issues—because of its results. You should know. Three days ago you operated on one of the results. However—so we’ve got one good guy and one bad guy in a trap together. That makes separating the lamb and the wolf a little tricky. By the way, most operating stills need at least three men. Who’s the third?”

  “Nathan O’Teale.”

  “I might have guessed. So your long-range proposal is that we pick up where the Founding Fathers left off in 1794 and solve a problem they couldn’t solve: cash for the mountains other than moonshine. And what’s your immediate proposal?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come now!” David sounded sarcastic. “You thwarted justice last week. You must have some alternative plan.”

  The doctor gave David an enigmatic look. “I’m not God. I just live here—and want to help.”

  I wanted to help Opal McHone too. I had not forgotten the quiet promise I had made to myself at the time of her baby’s death that somehow, sometime I would try to give her a vision larger than her ignorance and superstition. And now that time had come, for Opal had a new burden to carry: her Tom was in trouble. He had gone over to blockade-running for her.

  While David and the doctor thought and struggled with themselves and with each other as to the way out of the moonshining situation, I was finding that my own idealism about what was really right for the Cove quailed before the knowledge that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had not found an answer to the mountain men’s poverty either. But meanwhile I could at least offer compassion and understanding to Opal.

  She was a shy woman with almost no education and little self-­confidence. It was sometimes painful to watch her struggle to express even a ­simple idea; I could not see in her the fine mind or the sharp sensitivities of a Fairlight Spencer.

  Yet for all that, she was appealing. Whenever I saw her, she would sidle up to me, reaching out to me mutely—like an animal with sad eyes pleading for attention and affection.

  So at the first opportunity I went to see her. She received me warmly, even eagerly. Looking at her in her old loose-fitting clothes with strands of her lank ha
ir around her face, it seemed to me that Opal’s wistful eyes, her lacerated heart, and her mute longings were more evident than ever.

  She did not confide about the stilling to me (I had not expected that she would) but she knew about it all right. The mountain women had an intuition about such things. However, she did let drop the fact that Dr. MacNeill had been to their cabin for a long talk with Tom. We talked ramblingly, in leisurely fashion, about when to begin the reading lessons I had promised her, and then about the Maternity Clinic which I hoped the doctor would help us start soon. There the mountain mothers could be taught proper care for their babies. In imagining this I was able to give Opal an altogether new point of view about baby care. And the more I talked, the more my enthusiasm for the project grew. I made up my mind that the minute the men’s minds were free of the blockading problem, I was going to press hard for the clinic.

  By now I knew how much more Opal needed than the knowledge of how to care for babies. There were her fears and superstitions (many of them like the liver-grown idea, laid upon her by Granny McHone, now dead). All were tangled up with crude and irrational ideas about God. How could a novice like me set about correcting Opal’s theology? I did not have Miss Alice’s knowledge of the Bible, nor her perceptions distilled out of her lifetime of experience. Still, I had to try.

  “You know, Opal,” I suggested hesitantly, “have you ever thought that the only ugly things in this Cove are man’s fault, while the beautiful things are God’s work? Look at those mountains.” We were sitting on her front steps and her eyes followed mine to the far horizon where the blue peaks melted into the skyline. Always I had to take a deep breath when I looked, really looked at the amplitude of beauty all around us. Only now in the late afternoon with twilight coming on, it was a delicate beauty, not so spectacular as usual. The sky overhead was an inverted bowl with a pale blue lining; over the far mountains, rose faded to peach, with tiny gray clouds looking as if they had been given their marching orders to tramp as majestically across a twilight sky as small clouds can.

  “Living in the middle of beauty like this,” I said, “we’ve no call to have puny ideas about God. Why do you suppose His world is so fancy-fine, so full of wonderment,” I asked, reaching for some of Opal’s own expressions, “if He doesn’t want everything to be good and perfect and right and healthy? But we can spoil His good work. When we mess things up, then we shouldn’t blame Him and try to make ourselves feel better by contending that it’s what He wanted.” Even as I was speaking, I was thinking how glad I was that neither David nor Miss Alice could hear my fumbling words.

  Still, Opal’s eyes had grown more soft and luminous as I talked, so some part of this was getting through to her.

  But then, my inner thoughts ran, how does someone like Opal, caught in the predicament she is, find God’s way out? Suddenly I was looking down into a great gulf fixed between my pat religious theories and the real-life problems of folks like Opal and Tom, and before the yawning abyss I was mute.

  Sure, I believe the theory, believe it deeply. My heart as well as my brain tells me that it is so. But how do we go about applying to this situation the fact that God lives, that He wants His world—including Opal and Tom and this Cove—to be right? “We have to cooperate with Him,” I’ve just finished saying to Opal. But where do we start cooperating? What are we to do now?

  I could never have guessed that it was Opal herself who would point the way.

  Sitting at the table-desk in my bedroom on Wednesday evening, I saw lights moving across the yard and heard men’s low voices. Then a few minutes later, there was a knock on my bedroom door. It was Ruby Mae. “Teacher, thar’s a ruckus in the yard. Prince is a-carryin’ on something fearful.”

  “How? What’s he doing?”

  “A-snortin’ and a-pawin’—”

  “Well, anything wrong with Prince, you’d better call Mr. Grantland.”

  “Yes’m, but would you be willin’ to come and see first?”

  So I went with her. Even as we reached the back hall, I found that she was right: Prince was banging the sides of his stall and snorting. I picked up a lamp from the hall table as we went through into the yard.

  “That horse sounds plumb miserable,” Ruby Mae commented.

  We found the stable door standing ajar; that was unusual because of an evening David was always careful to close and latch it. The familiar odors of hay and manure and leather rose to meet us as the door creaked open on its hinges. I held the lamp aloft and the soft light fell across David’s saddle, only it was not hanging on its peg but was lying on the floor. I stooped to look more closely. The saddle had been slashed over and over in long vertical gashes, the girths ripped out and flung on the floor beside it.

  Alarmed, I ran forward holding the lamp even higher to get a look at Prince—and in my shock almost let the lamp drop from my hand.

  Ruby Mae shrieked, “Oh! Lordamercy!”

  Prince was pawing and kicking the sides of his stall in riotous protest. His beautiful flowing tail and his mane and forelocks had been sheared off and were lying in the hay at his feet. I thrust the lamp into Ruby Mae’s hands and began a hasty examination of his flanks, running my hands over his high shoulders, searching for any cuts or wounds. So far as I could tell, there were none—only the shearing. Prince looked denuded, pathetic—and he knew it. He nickered and nuzzled me with his soft moist nose, then put his head on my shoulder as if pleading for consolation.

  “Oh Lordy, I could bust out cryin’,” Ruby Mae said.

  I was already; tears were standing in my eyes. Prince had been as beautiful as his name, a proud animal. Now he was a caricature of a horse.

  “Hit’s the meanest job of work I ever seed. Now who would do a thing like that?”

  “How I wish I knew! But Ruby Mae, we’ve got to—Will you go get Mr. Grantland? Only I’m not sure I can bear to look at his face when he sees this. I’ll stay with Prince.”

  She ran out, but could not have gotten far, when she began shrieking, “Holp! Holp! Teacher—Mr. Grantland—Quick! Somebody, come quick!”

  I dashed to the barn door. In front of the schoolhouse, flames were leaping into the night. I picked up my skirts and ran toward the fire. David had heard too, and he and I reached the spot almost at the same instant. It was the wooden pulpit from the church, carried into the yard, ablaze.

  “Can’t save the pulpit now,” David snapped. “No use. But we’ve got to keep flying embers from leaping to the church roof. Buckets—we need buckets and everybody’s help. Get Ida—”

  “There’s one pail in the springhouse,” I offered, even as I sprinted in that direction. “I’ll fill that one.”

  Ruby Mae and David bolted for the house calling for Miss Ida. Soon we got a bucket brigade going. Fortunately, there was about twenty feet between the fiery pulpit and our new building, and with the fifth pail of water, the fire began to sizzle and die. After that, the four of us stood there in the moonlight staring at the charred pulpit—four wet, confounded people—Miss Ida looking ludicrous in her white nightgown and wrapper with streaks of dirt and soot across the front, and the ruffled nightcap on her head askew over one ear.

  Now I had to say it. “David, this isn’t all. There’s more.” My heart was in my throat. “It’s Prince.”

  “He’s not—not dead?”

  “No, thank God. Not that. But it’s bad. His hair, it’s all been cut off. It’s awful!”

  David was already running toward the stable.

  The next day David made no effort to keep the events of the night before from the school children—or from anyone. The result was that poor Prince was on exhibition most of the day. The children stood in clusters staring at the horse, growing more indignant by the hour, their comments flying.

  “He was so purty with that long mane a-sweepin’ back in the wind.”

  “And with his tail a-flyin’ . . .”

  “And now he looks plumb onnatural, like a mule.”

  “Pet him. He ca
n’t holp it.”

  “No, but can’t holp hit don’t mend it.”

  “Look at them flies a-pesterin’ him. Now Prince don’t have nothin’ to flick ’em off with.”

  “It’s that pitiful.”

  “Reckon we could take turns a-fannin’ the flies off’n him?”

  “Somebody was full of pizen-meanness for sure. Wish I could knock-fight the livin’ daylights out’n them that done it.”

  The youngsters of the Cove had always been fond of David. Now they rallied around him ready to do battle for him and his horse. Perhaps it was the swelling tide of support among the school children that gave David the idea. At any rate, he announced his plan in school one afternoon.

  “All of you know the dreadful thing that was done to Prince. And because you feel as badly about it as I do, I’m wondering if you’d be willing to help me?”

  Hands eagerly went up all over the room. “Shore, Preacher.”

  “Tell us what ye want, Preacher. We’d do most onything.”

  “There seem to be some folks in Cutter Gap who hate the church—and me—and even Prince—and who want to run us out and close down the church and the school. Well, that would be wrong. Anyway we don’t scare that easily, and we’re going to fight right back. But not with fists or guns. We’re going to fight in a different way.

  “Now, this is my plan. I’ve saved the hair from Prince’s mane and tail. If you’ll help me make that hair into a great many watch fobs, then we’ll tell a lot of people—not just in the Cove, but outside too—what happened to Prince. And we’ll sell the watch fobs to buy a new saddle and a new pulpit and to help the church. Maybe buy some hymnbooks.”

  The children were enthusiastic. David set up sawhorse tables in the stable yard, and early and late, the boys and girls came and went, working on the watch fobs. Mr. Holcombe, who knew how to shoe horses and was also a tin-smith of sorts, made us several hundred tiny tin necks and rings which we used to grasp the horsehair and hold it neatly at the top of each little fob. David made a long list of individuals and of organizations and I agreed to help him write the letters. In each letter we told the story briefly and asked for any amount that the recipient wished to send in return for the unusual watch-fob memento.