Christy

by Catherine Marshall

  “Actually, Christy, you ought to consider something,” he said, never one to lead into a subject delicately. “The mountain attitude towards sex may be more nearly right than society’s attitude—in the warmed-over Victorian tradition. It sure is more realistic. It’s the way things are. Way they were meant to be too. Here in the mountains, folks see sex for pleasure and for procreation. They’re right. Leave out either one, and you’re in trouble.”

  Well, I was thinking, so maybe there is still a lot of prudery about sex even in the younger set back in Asheville—especially among the girls. But why a lecture on sex to me? I was having trouble meeting the doctor’s level gaze.

  With relief I saw David approaching. “Excuse me, Doctor, for interrupting. I’m leaving,” David said to me. “Didn’t want to go without letting you know, Christy. May I take you home?”

  Suddenly I knew that I very much wanted to go with David. I tried not to sound as eager as I felt. “Yes, thanks. I am ready to go.”

  Late that night a strong wind arose. This happened often in Cutter Gap, something about the way the mountains cupped the valley so that they created a sort of wind tunnel. I lay in bed listening to the wind wailing around the eaves of the house. And then it increased in tempo and became a wild wind, as if it had blown many a mile from behind the mountains—and beyond.

  And I thought it sounded like women, a chorus of women crying, sometimes moaning, sometimes chanting in a high-pitched lament. And in the wistfulness of their sweet sad song, I could hear the words

  Down in the valley, the valley so low

  Hang your head over, hear the wind blow;

  Hear the wind blow, love, hear the wind blow;

  Hang your head over, hear the wind blow.

  It began as the golden autumn. Long summer days had melted into shorter autumn days with heavy rains in their wake. Then suddenly, all the stored-up beauty of summer blazed forth in an avalanche of color that tore at the eyeballs and dazzled the senses.

  This must be love, I thought. My eyes must be open to beauty because I was in love with David. I was young and he was young and wasn’t this what the poets sang about? So I went through my days wanting to sing and to dance. The trees in their shouting colors were just for us! Only in the mountains had I seen such hues: the dark red of the sour-woods; the brown and bright orange of the red oaks; the luminous gold of the hickories; the crimson of the sumac and the scarlet oaks—always with the purple-blue Smokies for a backdrop, like the stain of ripe Concord grapes.

  Even the nights were lighter and the stars brighter than I had ever seen them. Surely the Little Bear was laughing and the Dipper dripping wine, and all for me, for me—for us, for us.

  And of a morning there would be mists rising from the valley floor. Then day after day the sun would break through to dissolve the frost, to chase away the vapors, and to shine on those golden leaves.

  David and I walked and rode horseback through woodland avenues of gold and bronze and copper. Sometimes we would rein in our horses to stare, bedazzled by a single tree, looking, with the sun shining full on it, as if a fire had been lighted at its heart. And David would lean far over in his saddle to plant a kiss on my lips to seal the moment. Or to tease him, I would go galloping off down one of those woodland avenues with him in full pursuit.

  Once I had let David kiss me, a barrier had gone down; each kiss was easier and more natural than the last. So every time we were alone, David would reach out for me.

  David was adept at romance and almost too sure of himself, I sometimes thought—and then wondered at myself for thinking it. But surely he was assuming much in our relationship. I still found myself holding back from giving him a final answer, and this did not seem logical even to me. I tried to go back in my mind to exactly what he had said, gesture by gesture, sentence by sentence, on that July night when, in the midst of his sorrow and discouragement after Tom McHone’s murder, he had asked me to marry him. His actions now, his kisses, told me that he considered us engaged, a sort of mutual, unspoken agreement. What bothered me most was that though David acted as if he loved me, he never really used the words. If David did not love me enough to say so spontaneously, yes, even to shout it to the world, then could this really be love? If not . . . and then would come a suffocating sensation in my diaphragm, as if I needed air that my lungs could not suck in fast enough. What was wrong?

  But then he would appear, strong and vital; and in his presence my doubts would vanish like those morning mists being chased out of our valley by the rising sun. For I enjoyed David’s warm lips on mine. I liked being in his arms. Surely, I could not have all that physical feeling for him and not be in love. I must be wrong to be insisting, in my heart, on his saying certain words. Perhaps his actions were all that was necessary. Time would work this out; of course it would.

  And there were other causes for joy that golden autumn. All the hard work of the previous year was at last reaping rewards. I now had all the textbooks and supplies I needed for my school.

  And we were readying space in the mission house for the boarders. We planned to start slowly with three boys and four girls. The girls would sleep on cots set side by side across the back of the second floor room in the mission house; the boys in the third floor attic room. In the evening, the big living room would be the study hall.

  The boarders were being chosen for a variety of reasons: Mountie O’Teale, since my experience with her had given every reason to believe that the child would blossom away from her terrible home environment; Isaak McHone because, with his father gone, he so needed to be near David that Opal and Uncle Bogg had agreed. Then Becky and Dicle Holt lived so far away and the long walk was harder for them than for the Holt boys; Wanda Ann Beck, ten, had bad eyes (trachoma, Dr. MacNeill said) and needed to be closer for his care. Also it looked as if we might have to take in Lundy Taylor. If his father was returning home at all (as we suspected), it was too sporadically to do Lundy any good. Then Arrowood Holcombe wanted desperately to be with us, and though David was having trouble persuading Mr. Holcombe to give up Arrowood’s help at home, it looked as if we might win our way on that too.

  And almost best of all, there was the book on Folk Schools that Mrs. Browning—true to her promise—had sent me. For the first time I saw where we could go with the Cutter Gap school—or at least where I thought we ought to go. It was exhilarating to see a goal ahead and start driving towards it. Previously I had had many ideas about the school—a clinic and adult education and the rest—but there had been too many holes in the fabric of my dreams: problems which city and town schools did not have and for which I could find no solutions. But now Grundtvig and Christen Kold, as I came to know them through the book, were reweaving the fabric so that it was whole and complete: I had been full only of questions; they had answers.

  Like that big question I had wondered about during my first meeting of the Sewing Circle at Miss Alice’s: How would believing in the love of God solve problems like illiteracy and poverty for the highlanders? Now I saw the connection between Miss Alice’s certainty about the inner guiding Light and Grundtvig’s ideas. God did have a master plan for the Cove and Grundtvig was saying that we could find that plan by looking deep into the human spirit, our own and the children’s and their parents’.

  It was a startling experience to have this book, printed in London, come into my hands at precisely the right moment. Half-formulated ideas, in a blaze of recognition of their own kind, rushed out to meet the luminous thoughts on the printed page. I all but chained Among the Danes around my neck; carried it around with me until it was thumbed and worn; talked about it at the table until the others must have dreaded mealtimes.

  “You see,” I explained one evening at dinner, “Bishop Grundtvig believed that childhood shouldn’t ever be thought of just as a prelude to becoming an adult. Childhood ought to be enjoyed for itself. Too much brain work forced on children kills something in their spirit. Let them run and play and make treehouses and catch lightning
bugs and lie in a field staring at the clouds floating by. Provide them a wholesome environment, and then let their spirits go free, free, free.”

  Miss Alice smiled appreciatively. “My Quaker father would have agreed with that.”

  “As far as I have observed,” Miss Ida remarked primly, “children need no encouragement to play.”

  “Grundtvig saw each stage in growing up as needing a special kind of education,” I continued. “He said, ‘Life is growth, and everything must come in the order of nature.’ ”

  David was not really listening, but Miss Alice had a question. “What about those hard teen years?”

  “A lot of physical activity during adolescence. Deprive young people of that and you get trouble every time. Lessons, sure. But also a taste of several kinds of work, things they may choose as a vocation later. Much work with the hands for both boys and girls. The learning of respect for manual work, never something to be looked down on as somehow inferior to mental work. Then lots of athletics. Wear them out with folk dances, things like that.”

  At least I had Miss Alice with me, so I went on. “Grundtvig saw youth—seventeen, eighteen on—as the time of awakening. And he was strong on the point that awakening and enlivening always have to come before enlightenment. Otherwise, cramming facts down the gullet is mostly lost motion.”

  “So that means,” Miss Alice picked it up, “that Grundtvig would begin with serious education about the time pupils are leaving school for good in most countries.”

  “That’s right. He would get serious then because they’re finally ready. By then they want answers as to what life is all about. Their heads and their hands are full of question marks. So that’s why he thought they shouldn’t be met with more questions: there are no examinations in his schools. Rather the purpose of school is to help youth find answers.”

  “And this man Grundtvig had all the answers, I suppose, to what life is all about?” David said, finally entering the conversation.

  “No, he didn’t claim that. But he was full of ideas. He used a fascinating method to find answers. It’s really what Socrates did, the spoken word, the dialogue. Grundtvig and Kold both thought of the spoken word as lots more important than books.

  “Even the printed words they did use were really just the spoken words committed to paper. I mean like folk tales, Nordic and Grecian mythology, folk songs—all those things.”

  Miss Ida was rather pointedly clearing the table for dessert, so I jumped up to help her. David was still not taking what I was saying seriously. “Wonder what deep significance this Bishop would find in some of Uncle Bogg’s tall tales?” I started to poke him with a fork I was carrying, but caught Miss Ida’s look and hastily went on gathering up dishes. “As a matter of fact, he’d find more significance than you think. He didn’t think that Nordic mythology, for instance, could be dismissed as pagan superstition, but that it was a living expression of the human spirit, therefore creative, and should be paid attention to!”

  Miss Alice’s smile twinkled at me, but David said, “Christy, how can you get so worked up over the ideas of some foreign churchman?”

  “Because they’re fascinating. And because that’s just the way I am.”

  “Am what?” It was Dr. MacNeill standing in the dining room doorway. None of us had heard him coming in.

  “Come in, Doctor.” David seemed glad of the interruption. “Set sail with us. We’re afloat on a sea of ideas.”

  The doctor picked up a straight chair from its place against the wall and set it down between David and Miss Alice. “Ideas about what?”

  “Oh, a school. Sweden or somewhere.”

  “David! Not Sweden! Denmark. I knew you weren’t listening.” I carried my stack of plates into the kitchen.

  “Sweden? Denmark? Both quite a ways from Cutter Gap. Why schools in Denmark?”

  From the kitchen I could hear Miss Alice explaining to the doctor some of the ideas we had been discussing. Only filtered through the quiet and order of her mind they seemed not only logical, but eminently feasible.

  I was halfway to the table with a deep-dish apple pie when I heard the doctor say, “Sure, I’ve heard about Danish Folk Schools.”

  “You have! Where?” I asked wonderingly.

  “From a visiting professor in Medical School, specialist in eye surgery. A Dane who got his start at a Folk School.”

  “What did he say about them?”

  “Let’s see. He had a lot to say. Jensen, his name was. Son of a peasant farmer. Said deciding to go to that school one October changed his life.”

  With effort I controlled the rising excitement inside me and made myself ask slowly, “How? How did it change his life?”

  The doctor smiled at my eagerness. “He credited the personality of the teacher with that. Can’t think of the teacher’s name. Said his teacher gave him a great love for Denmark and her people.” A remembering look came into the doctor’s eyes. “Come to think of it, Jensen was the happiest man I ever knew. I remember him whistling, striding around the campus, always whistling.”

  “That’s right! Grundtvig had that joy too. But not always. Up to the age of forty-one he’d been a serious, gloomy sort of perfectionist and a serious critic of his country. But then he had a deep religious experience and he realized that he had to build people up, to love them. And it was then he got all those great ideas about the part education would play in a national awakening.

  “But we mustn’t just talk about it,” I plunged on. “I think we should do something about it right here in the Cove. For example, why couldn’t David start a school for the men in the mornings? Use the parlor here. That way we’d get the older boys in my school away from the little children, and you could add to them any of the other men who want to come.”

  David smiled at me in a patronizing way. “It just wouldn’t work, Christy.”

  Dr. MacNeill held up a restraining hand. “Wait a moment before we judge. Christy, what would David do with the men? What kind of classes?”

  “Not the same as for children. Even if a man can’t read or write, treat him as an adult, an equal. Begin small, maybe with only three or four men in a class.”

  David was leaning back in his chair tilted precariously on its two back legs, twirling his watch chain in his fingers. “So a group of mountain men have just ambled into the parlor across the hall, rusty black felt hats in hand, to go to school. What do I do then?”

  “There are several things you might do,” I retorted, stung by his tone. “It might be smart to begin with a merry story, for example.”

  “ ‘Merry story!’ That must be straight out of that wonderful book of yours!”

  “It is a wonderful book!” I flung back. “So you begin with a funny story that takes them into history. Like an episode from John Sevier’s life, something like that. Before they know it, you’re into a history lesson, not for memorizing facts or dates or anything like that, but for the excitement of it, the fascination of it. What real men and women did. How they succeeded. What their failures were. How these mountains were settled. Some of the men would have stories of their own to contribute too about their own ancestors.”

  Miss Alice was looking at me out of those pools of quietness that were her gray eyes. “Then—?”

  “Then you’d have to sell the men on real reasons for learning to read and write and for mathematics. Like figuring out land acreage, and what a cord of wood is, so they can handle money and keep a record on paper. They’d be proud of learning those things.

  “And literature. Begin where they are, with Jeb Spencer’s ballads and Uncle Hogg’s tall tales. And then introduce them to some rollicking poetry and some stories from other countries.

  “Oh, and David, it would be so easy for you to teach woodworking! Their fathers made handcrafted furniture. They could copy some of the wonderful old pieces in the cabins. And it would take arithmetic to figure out the lumber you need, wouldn’t it? Let the men sell the furniture and keep books. That’s wri
ting and arithmetic, isn’t it?”

  David spoke patiently, as to a child. “Nice ideas in theory, Christy. But you’re forgetting how these men are. They’d come for two or three mornings—and then quit. As for learning community responsibility, forget it. They’re not capable of it.”

  “Then why are you here, if you think we’re that hopeless?” the doctor asked.

  “ ‘We’?”

  “I’m a mountain man.”

  “You’re different.”

  “But you were lumping all mountain men together. If I’m any exception, it’s because of several men who felt as Christy does—they saw possibilities in some of us. Maybe you should know—even today it wouldn’t be possible for me to practice medicine in Cutter Gap if my friends and some of their wealthy patients didn’t help. The Cove people can’t pay a doctor. So what does that mean? That they go without medical care? You see, those men dreamed a dream for all of us back here, so they gave me the chance to help fulfill it.”

  “Well—yes. That’s fine. But Christy’s ignoring the contrast between most of the mountain men and the Scandinavians. Scandinavians are energetic. These men were born lazy and raised tired.”

  “They weren’t born lazy. It’s just that they grew up with nothing to look forward to.”

  David pushed his chair away from the table and rose to his feet with a look on his face that he meant to be good-humored. “Look Christy, I’m not against your ideas about building up the school here in the Cove. In four or five years—who knows? But right now we have one small schoolhouse that has to double as a church and has just sprung a leak in the new roof. And I’ve got to get out there and fix it. So—if you’ll excuse me . . .”

  No one said anything for a moment after David left. The autumn, the golden autumn. What had happened to the shine of it?