Christy

by Catherine Marshall

  “So I took a bath and changed my clothes and dashed cold water on my eyelids until the tear stains were gone. That night at the dinner table I was silent, the visiting Friend very talkative. I remember that he declaimed long and eloquently about the dangers of being led by ‘law’ instead of by the indwelling Light, and my parents listened, fascinated. He left the next day for England.

  “By the next month I guessed that I was ‘with child.’ There are no words in the English language or in any language to describe the agony of those weeks. I kept my news to myself, though looking back now I honestly don’t know how a young girl could stand that much pressure with no one in whom to confide.

  “It was frightful morning sickness that finally brought the story out. In the end, I told all of it to my father and mother. “Sorrow descended on our home, such sorrow as we had never known, even through death. Father ran the gamut of emotions. He was a gentle man. I had not known that he was capable of such anger. He spent great sums of money with secret agents in the British Isles trying to track down the man. But it was no use. The Friend had returned to his South Seas, had disappeared somewhere into the wilds of New Zealand.

  “The next question was what to do? My parents wanted me to go away to have the baby, then find someone to adopt it. I was willing to go away for a time to save them and myself the embarrassment of the months of being heavy with child. But in my eyes, it didn’t seem right to give away my baby. Nothing could change what had happened, no fairytale imaginings, no dodging, no amount of running away. My life, I felt, was set now in a certain pattern. Probably I would never marry, not because I was warped on the subject of sex forever, but because I was not at all sure that the kind of man I wanted to marry would want me now. So why run at all? Why not do the direct and honest thing, bear the consequence of my own act and rear the child I was bearing?

  “My parents agonized with me in this decision, but in the end they agreed. I did go away to Burlington, New Jersey, to stay with Grandmother Seebohn until the baby was born, a girl, a beautiful child. Then I came home to Ardmore.

  “Having decided on this course of honest transparency, father summoned the head of our Quaker Meeting to our home. She was Sarah Lindsay, a tiny slight woman, but a great spirit. In our parlor that evening she sat primly, her shawl around her shoulders, her placid face framed by her thin muslin cap, and listened gravely while father as the head of the household, related the sequence of events. Then he told Sarah of my decision to rear the daughter myself.

  “That evening father virtually placed in Sarah’s frail hands our family’s standing in the community—which was considerable—as well as my future. When he had finished, there was one of those long Quaker silences. Even now I can see Sarah’s tiny hands resting, palms up, relaxed on her lap, as if ready to receive anything heaven might care to give. There was no hurry. We all knew that Sarah was praying—and listening.

  “Finally she spoke directly to me. ‘Thee has made the right choice. Now thee will know as few humans ever know it, the love of thy God. Betimes it will mold thee into a great spirit. And that love will come to thee too from every soul in our Meeting. Our Meeting will be to thee as thy larger family. And thy daughter, this little girl, shall be loved as no child has ever been loved before.’

  “At that I started weeping, and couldn’t stop. Sarah’s words had begun the melting of something hard and rebellious and bitter in me. I had indeed made the right choice because in rejecting secrecy I had also rejected the road to cynicism.

  “Sarah’s prophesy came true. We never knew exactly how she chose to tell our Meeting, perhaps the Elders and the Overseers first, perhaps then in tiny groups. But there never was any gossip or any finger-pointing. Once when one woman tried a little holier-than-thou attitude, she was stringently disciplined by Sarah, who had her own methods, and that was that.

  “The true greatness of the Society of Friends—for all its human weakness—was manifest in a situation like that. They rallied round me. They were the ones who protected me from any gossip-mongers of the larger Ardmore community, though I never quite knew how.

  “Through them I learned that true forgiveness includes total acceptance. And out of acceptance wounds are healed and happiness is possible again.

  “Nevertheless, my experience had two far-reaching effects on our Quaker community. One was, they concluded that in believing that the inner Light would teach each individual all he needed to know, they had neglected sex instruction as well as religious instruction for the young. They had even neglected the revelations which God had given other men as put down in Scripture. So courageously this branch of the Friends began revolutionary instruction for the young. That, in turn, led inevitably to the first Friends schools. Those fine secondary schools have multiplied and are thriving throughout Pennsylvania.

  “The second long-range result was a new look at the place of emotion and feeling in religion. As our Meeting quietly pondered this, they realized that in their emphasis on the inner Light, the typical Friend had come to judge the state of his relationship with God entirely by what he found within himself. Obviously that made for an up-and-down religious experience, dependent upon how much sleep one had had the night before; or if a teen-ager, whether one’s glands were cutting up capers; or if older, whether damp weather was making one’s arthritis hurt.

  “Such morbid introspection,” Miss Alice added crisply, “was nonsense. Either God exists—or He does not. If He does, either an individual has a relationship with Him—or that relationship has been severed. Indigestion or arthritis can’t change the bottom fact that God is or the unfailingness of a single one of His promises.

  “So our Meeting decided that henceforth there must always be ‘checks’ to present-day revelation: after sharing such insights with a group, several persons bringing their common sense and their intelligence to bear must then agree on a course of action. And although emotions of love for one another were fine and admirable, there must also always be integrity of motive—honesty, purity, unselfishness.

  “But to get back to me. After that, I lived at home and taught school. Happiness flowed into our home again. Of course for me there was a scar—but nothing more, except perhaps the distillation of a realism and a wisdom that was not possible for me before, and a great overflowing compassion for anyone who has been hurt by life.

  “Finally, before his death, I let my father have his way and legally adopt my daughter. So in his old age, it was Purtie’s daughter who sat on his lap and made the rounds with him on his errands for the stove business.

  “She grew up to be a tall beautiful woman with large expressive blue eyes—like yours, Christy. And except that your hair is darker, you look enough like my daughter to be her twin.”

  I thought back to my first morning in Cutter Gap, to that moment when Miss Alice had opened her front door and had been visibly startled at seeing me.

  “Did your daughter marry and have a family?” I asked her.

  “No children, but a husband.”

  “And where do they live now?”

  “She died three years ago.” Miss Alice paused. For the first time, she seemed to be making an effort to keep her voice matter-of-fact.

  “Thee must know, Christy. My daughter Margaret Seebohn Henderson—became Dr. MacNeill’s wife.”

  For the first few days at home I sank into a state of pampered bliss, sleeping late, stuffing myself on mother’s cooking, seeing my friends. Then gradually there came the realization that while Asheville had not changed much, I had. In comparison with the flavorsome personalities of Cutter Gap, many city folk now seemed almost colorless to me and city life unexciting. Even so, there was the value of perspective in having put some distance between me and the Cove.

  For that reason, I was glad that my last talk with Miss Alice had come just before I had left for home. In the simple recital of her poignant story she had jolted me. Slowly during the weeks at home, by a process which I did not understand, seeds buried in the tale its
elf were germinating and producing fruit after their kind—new awareness, accretive insights. The first was that Alice Henderson, in trying to step down from any pedestal on which I had unwittingly placed her, had succeeded paradoxically in making herself seem greater than ever. It was the difference between a plaster-of-paris saint and a flesh-and-blood woman who had been through the fires and had emerged, not unscathed, but a stronger woman with a deeper compassion.

  Also, I saw for the first time that we have to accept people the way they are and not be shocked about anything. In my idealism, that had been hard for me. I had not understood Miss Alice’s acceptance of the mountain people, nor Dr. MacNeill’s, and had often been frustrated, sometimes even infuriated by their unwillingness to push harder for changes.

  In the light of Miss Alice’s story, I understood that the reason we have to accept other people is simply because God receives us just the way we are. Yes, all of us to the last person—even to Bird’s-Eye Taylor and to Lundy. It was ironic that someone like Opal McHone had understood that better than I.

  I had never thought it should be that way. Had I been doing it, I would have arranged gradations of acceptability according to how bad or how good we were—or how hard we have tried. But Miss Alice had helped me to see that the Power who broods over our aching world has quite a different idea: He persists in receiving us and loving us all even when we reject Him and refuse to have anything to do with Him, even when we strut our little intellects and insist that He does not exist.

  Throughout my months in the Cove, there had been Alice Henderson’s gentle, unfailing teaching about the validity and the “presentness” of the inner Light, and her insistence that I not take her word for this but actively experiment with it, as on that day of Little Burl’s operation. Perhaps the most important single secret she had taught me so far was the how of looking to this inner Reality for the help I needed:

  First, I had to recognize evil for what it was. That meant honesty—which could be costly in day-by-day dealings with people. It took vigilance too.

  Second, I had to declare war on that specific evil—whether it was disease or mental illness or a child who was on the wrong path or snarled human relationships or my own impatience or temper or resentment or just that I violently hated some duty which I knew perfectly well I had to perform.

  Third—and here was the heart of the secret that I was struggling to grasp—I had to step aside and ask Someone else to do the fighting for me. And every time I thought of my particular battle—usually many times a day—I had to step consciously out of the way again and give gratitude to Him for the battle He was waging on my behalf right then. Sometimes it took days, sometimes longer, for evil was rarely flimsy but the outcome was sure; sure because He was and is the Lord of life. And sure, because evil is at the last always a coward that slinks away when finally challenged and faced down.

  Eventually the results of the victory would be there for anyone to see, whether in a healthy body or a restored mind; or a boy or girl whose values—all awry—were back in place; or a ruptured relationship healed; or, perhaps, just in the miracle of finding joy in what had once been a hateful task.

  It was wonderful to have the time during my vacation to try to assimilate discernments like these.

  David, too, was taking a vacation, a short two-week one. His letters came regularly, not exactly love letters, but warm and teasing, jocular, with tidbits of news about this person and that. And I discovered that my heart was back in the Cove with Fairlight and Little Burl and Opal and Isaak and Mountie and many another. And sometimes I caught myself thinking about that young wife of Dr. MacNeill’s who had looked something like me. I wanted to know more about her, what sort of person she had been.

  At the beginning of my third week at home, David forwarded to me a letter postmarked Knoxville. It was from Mr. Hazen L. Smith.

  Dear Miss Huddleston:

  You will soon receive an invitation from Mrs. Lawrence Toliver, Jr., President of the University Club, about talking to the women. I hope that you will choose one of the two dates Mrs. Toliver suggests and come, preferably to their first meeting of the season.

  Also when you do come back to Knoxville, Mrs. Hazen and I would like to have you stay with us overnight. I have a list of businessmen for you to contact with the hope of their donating additional supplies. Who ever told you that the mountain work is wholly your opportunity!

  I remain, your faithful servant,

  Hazen L. Smith

  P.S. May I add my word to that of my husband? My dear, we do so want you for our house guest. May we expect you?

  Mary Smith

  In a few days the letter from Mrs. Toliver arrived. After some correspondence, we agreed on September tenth for my talk. This would be at the end of my holiday on my way back to Cutter Gap.

  Of course, once again mother and father tried to get me to drop schoolteaching and return to college. During several evenings in father’s library, I listened to all their arguments, feeling that in theory they were right. Of course I should finish college. But after hearing in detail my feelings about the future of the Cutter Gap work and talking all around the subject my parents agreed, in the end, that if I did not return to the Cove that September I would be leaving an unfinished task. And my father had always said that a true Huddleston tried hard to finish what he had begun! So, to my relief, they gave me their blessing on another term of schoolteaching.

  The fall session would not begin, however, until after “fodder pulling” (when the blades of corn were stripped and tied together into bundles to dry for “roughness” or food for cattle and horses during the winter) and most of the harvesting were over around the first of November.

  And so, at the end of my wonderful vacation at home, I took the train to Knoxville.

  I was seated at one end of a large, ornately furnished room crowded with well-dressed ladies. The woman who was introducing me was short and stout, and her introduction was turning out to be as elaborate as her clothes, all flounces and ruffles. She was wearing a green watered silk dress with gathered tiers all the way up the skirt; a ruffled collar edged with Venetian lace; a concoction of feathers and froth on her head with a filmy green veil over her face. Around her throat was a black velvet band secured with an amethyst pin. “. . . dear and delightful girl gave up a comfortable home . . .” I watched, fascinated, as the amethyst pin bobbed up and down with every word she spoke; any minute it was going to catch in the green veiling under her chin.

  “. . . left fond parents and a dear brother, parted from her loving friends and her host of beaux, to go into the destitute mountain regions . . .”

  You would have thought that I had gone to Africa. I squirmed uncomfortably on my velvet chair at being made out the self-sacrificing heroine. I was thankful that I had heeded mother and bought a new outfit. The dark red charmeuse dress and hat were elegant, not a bit like what a suffering martyr should be wearing.

  My hands were tightly clasped together in my lap to control their trembling. Suddenly I realized that I was moistening my lips over and over. I tried taking a series of slow deep breaths, hoping that this would get my fright under enough control so that the ladies would not notice.

  With effort I brought my mind back to what the lady was saying. “Our own dear Hazen Smith whom you all know, always so swift to hear the cry of the orphan, the lament of the widow, opened his warm heart one day last spring to . . .”

  Mechanically, I began rehearsing to myself the first sentences of my speech, “Ladies of the University Club: I was greatly honored by Mrs. Toliver’s invitation to speak to you today about . . .” But how could I say anything that would make women like these see and understand the mountains, my mountains? These women, kind and warmhearted though they were, had never seen anything like the Cove. I felt all but suffocated with the luxury of this room. So many Oriental rugs; the blue velvet portieres and sweeping draperies with their heavy brass cornices; the huge overstuffed chairs with their crocheted tidies;
every lampshade with its petticoat of fringe; the Sèvres figurines on the mantelpiece; the stuffed birds and wax flowers under glass domes.

  “. . . will not detain you longer with any poor words of mine. I know you are as eager as I am to hear what this charming young lady has to say to us. It is my very great privilege to present to you our very first speaker of the year for the University Club, Miss Christy Huddleston. My dear, right over here. Stand right here, so that everyone can see and hear you. There now. Just tell us all that’s on your heart.”

  She patted my arm and left me standing, trembling in the middle of the floor. If only, I thought, I might have had a table nearby for support. “Ladies of the University Club . . .” The voice, strained and far away, did not sound like mine. “Thank you for inviting me to be with you today.” Desperately I cast around for the next sentence, but my mind had suddenly gone blank with the faces in the room a blur.

  Thoughts flew by me like telephone poles flashing by a train window. Clickety-clack, clickety-clack . . . “Ladies of the University Club . . .” Clickety-clack, flash, flash, clickety-clack . . . “Thank you for . . .” But then finally (how much time had gone by?) I roped in one telephone pole, snared one idea: Mr. Smith, that was it! “Mr. Smith thought that you might be interested in hearing something of what I told him of my experiences in the mountains.” Better. “I suppose my story begins on the day when I first heard about the needs of the mountain boys and girls.” Gradually my fear receded as thoughts rose to take its place.

  I told them about Dr. Ferrand’s speech and how it had inspired me to teach school; about how it had felt to walk behind Mr. Pentland into a different world, to walk backwards into time where people spoke English sprinkled with Anglo-Saxon and Gaelic words. A peppery speech with that “bow and arrow twang” that Henry Thoreau had liked so much, and that made the English the rest of us used seem tame and stale. And about how in this strange country they still sang ballads and told haunt stories out of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.