Christy

by Catherine Marshall

  I felt deflated suddenly, and tired.

  Now that many shared experiences with folks like Miss Alice and Fairlight and Opal, Little Burl and Mountie and Isaak had laid foundations of mutual caring and trust, these relationships—even with the children—were striking deeper levels. More and more often my schoolchildren were opening up to me these hidden areas.

  One Thursday afternoon Zady Spencer came by the mission excited about a “hant tale” that her father had brought home from the man-talk at Bob Allen’s mill. “Teacher, Granny Barclay seen Old Marthy. Old Marthy’s a witch, ugly as a coot. No hair hardly. Monstrous red eyes—” The little girl’s black eyes in her thin face were aglitter with an unhealthy excitement. “Ye dasn’t not believe hit. Lots of folks has seen Old Marthy! Keeps a-creepin’ from house to house, hidin’ things from folks. One time throwed ashes into Mistress Allen’s churn, spoiled all of it.” Zady was shivering, her breath coming in little palpitating gasps.

  I knew that Granny Barclay was reputed to have “second sight”—a belief in seeing into the future which the Scottish and Irish immigrants had brought with them to the New World. Some of it may have been authentic. But the superstitions still being handed down to children like Zady were incredible.

  I thought about how often—after my pupils had come to know and to trust me—they had come to school bright-eyed and excited over ghost stories replete with vivid details: jealous witches forcing someone in the Cove to eat “witch balls” (pine needles wrapped round and round with human hair); the devil forcing a group one by one to kiss his buttocks as a pledge of allegiance; or the devil driving a cart black as ink drawn by black oxen down the mountainside.

  I put one arm around Zady. “And what did your father and mother say about the story of Old Martha?”

  “Mama jest got a funny look to her eyes. Said she’d heerd a pack of dogs a-howlin’ in the night. Said that was a bad sign.”

  I sighed, remembering Fairlight’s long silences, knowing well that same look Zady had seen in her mother’s eyes. Yes, there was trouble there, somewhere in the depths of Fairlight’s spirit, and I must find the way to reach it. Again I pulled my thoughts back to the little girl leaning against my arm. “Zady,” I asked gently, “are you afraid of the dark?”

  “Oh, yes’m! It’s scary to have to leave the firelight and walk into the shadders to bed. Most nights I put the kivers over my head. Gives me prickles to peer at the dark. Always scared for fear I’ll see a ghost.”

  “I know. I used to be like that when I was a little girl.”

  “You was!”

  “Yes, I was. Sometimes I’d long to run and climb in bed between mother and father. But then I’d be too ashamed to let them know that I was scared because I was too big a girl for that. So I’d lie there in my own bed shivering and shaking.”

  Zady was looking at me with interest. “How’d ye git over hit?”

  “One day they sang a certain hymn at Sunday school. Seemed as if it was just for me. I’ll sing the refrain for you:

  God will take care of you

  Through every day, o’er all the way,

  He will take care of you,

  He will take care of you—”

  “That’s nice.”

  “So whenever I was scared of the dark, I’d sing those four lines over and over to myself. And you know what, Zady? After a while the love of God was more real to me than any old ghost. And then all the ghosts went away, and ever since the dark has seemed friendly and cozy.”

  Zady hugged me and planted a wet kiss on my cheek. “Sing hit again, Teacher, and then I won’t disremember hit.”

  So I did—and the little girl skipped out the door, humming. After she had gone, I sat there pondering the fine line between faith and superstition; between that realistic facing up to life that Miss Alice was always urging on me and a handing over of faith to the power of negativism and evil.

  Like that sixteen-year-old girl in Miss Alice’s school in Cataleechie. The girl had been dying of tuberculosis and her one request of Alice Henderson was not for help to get well, but that she would make her a shroud so that she could see it and try it on before she died. Indignantly, Miss Alice had refused, suggesting to the girl that instead, she would do better to center her thinking on health.

  But death had had more dramatic appeal. The girl had finally persuaded her father to measure her and build her a pine coffin. Then she had had herself photographed lying in the coffin “so that I can see how fancy-fine I’ll look.” The girl had died eight months later.

  How could one so young actually prefer death to life! Yet the sixteen-year-old’s fatalism was common in the mountains.

  Some of this pessimism seemed to have its source in nature itself. In the highlander’s experience, nature was more stern than benevolent. From the depleted soil of the rockstrewn hillsides the mountain people wrested their meager harvests. There was no kindliness, only travail and misery in the howling winds whipping down from snowcapped peaks, whistling through the chinks of cabins, penetrating scanty clothes to the bone marrow. Man, little man, stood defenseless and insignificant, forgotten and forlorn against the mighty mountains.

  God—where was God? Somewhere out beyond that vast sweep of nature. His lightnings flashed. His thunderbolts were hurled. They reverberated from peak to peak, zigzagging across the skies, splitting the trunks of great trees from branch-tip to root-top, at times striking dead a man caught in the elemental fury.

  And so for them the issues of life and death were joined. Nor did God stay His hand—not for storms or pestilence or the disease that carried so many to early graves. Not for the hatred that rived hearts before it riddled bodies. Not even for the poverty that ground men and women and children into the dust of not caring.

  So this God must be Jehovah-Yahveh, the God of Mount Sinai, from whom Moses had hidden his face in terror. He was the God of the Old Testament, whose prophet Elisha could curse naughty children in the name of the Lord and count it proper revenge when she-bears came out of the wood to rend the babes. And men hacked their enemies to death shouting the name of the Lord. The winds blew and the seas raged—and men fled this Being lest He wrest from them the scanty security they had. How could little man hope to comprehend such a Being? So man’s only chance was to ally himself to Him through such obedience as he could manage, to “stand what has to be stood,” to slough his way through day by day—and desperately hope that in the end this terrible Jehovah would bring the faithful ones to glory in a better life than this one.

  That was the highlander’s faith. It was a belief to make the heart quake, not to comfort it. Shadows, stygian shadows of the mountains had cast their pall even on faith.

  As with Zady in her fear of the dark, so with her mother. After I had known the Spencers for several months, I came to see a connection with these fears and the location of their cabin. Anyone seeing the Spencer land for the first time would have supposed that the cabin at the top of Lonesome Ridge would always be in full daylight. Instead, the land wore the sharpest contrasts of light and shadow of any place I had seen in that area. At different times of day the higher peak opposite shut out the sun, plunging portions of the Ridge into blackness.

  Since that afternoon of Bob Allen’s brain operation when I had first watched the sun dipping behind the sheer rise of the Pinnacles opposite, how often Fairlight and I had seen that shadow creep across the face of the ridge. It was like an immense hand raised between the sun and the one who watched. From between the fingers of the giant’s hand a few streaks of light filtered through the trees, but in between, eerie ebony dusk lay across the land.

  Once I had asked Jeb why his ancestors had not built in a more protected and accessible spot. He had not known. Grandsir Spencer could have told me, but he had died in the spring two years before.

  Perhaps the answer was that Jeb’s great-great-great-grandmother, just over from the misty highlands of Scotland, had been the first Spencer to watch that giant’s hand come between her
and the sun. She must have seen that shadow creeping up the side of their ridge day after day. So she had directed her menfolk, “Build as high up as possible—there on the backbone of our land near the sun.”

  But not even the top bald of the ridge had been high enough to escape the gloaming. And I wondered if that ancestress of Jeb’s had been as depressed by the daily shrouding of the sun as Fairlight often was, as almost anyone would be.

  In fact, it was uncanny how faithfully Fairlight reflected in her nature the variations of light and shade of the mountains around her. For she could be as delighted as a careless child. Then abruptly her mood would change, and I would see behind her frightened eyes the cimmerian shadows of a complex nature. While it pleased me that my company mostly drew out the happy side, I was more and more troubled that at this deepest level, I did not seem to be helping at all. Gradually I had learned how deep these inarticulate emotions ran, how surging they were.

  I was thinking about all this one afternoon when Fairlight and I were sitting on her front porch shelling shucky beans. She was not very talkative, though she had commented that “Jeb’s had a right good turn with the bees. He muscled out’n the Cove two hundred thirty-five pounds of honey. The best ever, for a fact.”

  “That’s wonderful, Fairlight!”

  “Course if we was makin’ tracks for fortunes, we could make some more bee gums.”

  “Of course!”

  “No, it ain’t to be thought of.”

  “Why not?”

  “Don’t need no more of this world’s goods. Some folks gits plumb mesmerized when paper money is shook afore their eyes.”

  “But Fairlight, you still need so many things, basic things. There’s not the slightest danger of your getting greedy.”

  There was no answer. I looked at Fairlight and realized that she had not heard my last sentence. It was late in the afternoon now with the sun dipping. She was staring at the Pinnacle opposite with a look on her face that I had seen so often, a look that frightened me.

  “Christy,” her musical voice was low, confidential; still she did not turn her head to look at me, “See that other mounting? Sometimes I think it’s witched. Most every day it puts me in mind of the shadder o’death.” Her pan of beans slipped off her lap. She slid to her knees, reached for my arm, clinging to it, her mouth set in a grim line. “What is to be, will be. Nothing can stop it. It has to come to us all some time, I reckon. But Christy, I git the trembles when I think about bein’ put in a box and a-lyin’ out thar somewhere covered over with dirt.” Her voice had sunk to a whisper as if she was revealing too much.

  I started to say, “Fairlight, how silly! You’re not going to die—” but the words withered on my tongue. That would be too glib a reply. Not true either. All of us do have to die sometime. But I was still too young to have thought much about death. And death wasn’t real to me, whereas it was for Fairlight. In her short lifetime she had seen so many die, two of her and Jeb’s children—a newborn baby girl, Ceclie, and Jeter, a little boy of three, a score of friends and relatives. And back here in the mountains people were forced to look starkly into the face of the black-hooded figure. There was no way to soften or to dodge any least malevolent detail. No undertakers; nothing but a pine box or a half a bee-gum log—which the family must prepare; a hole in the red clay—which the family, sometimes boys as young as Isaak McHone, must dig. No camouflage or self-deception was possible. For one as impressionable as Fairlight this had left permanent scars.

  Knowing this, there struggled in my mind some thought about the danger of getting our gaze riveted on that dirt as the only reality, about how necessary it is to raise our eyes to see something beyond the pine box and the clay. What about all the promises that Christ made us about immortality, I wanted to ask. I knew that to Him the sensitive spirit of the woman beside me would be cherished. I had watched that spirit waken, start to leave resignation behind and begin the struggle to cast off limitations. “Let there be light,” she had learned in her first reading lesson. Fairlight’s spirit was not going to be snuffed out like a gutted candle and plunged into darkness, not for a moment could I have believed that.

  Fairlight seemed to expect no reply, no consolation in words; she simply needed to feel me close to her. With a shock I understood that I could not speak to her fears as easily as I had to Zady’s. In her thinking at least, it was too late for discussion or argument against the deep emotions that tortured her. Her battle with the mountain had become a personal battle; this was now her life pitted against the shadow. And even as I watched, the sun dipped behind the peak and the heinous gloom slanted across her upturned face.

  How can I ever forget that day in early October when Fairlight Spencer sent Zady to tell me that she needed me. Would I please come as soon as possible? No clue was offered as to what the need was. Only Zady’s dark brooding eyes and thin face screwed up with worry underscored the urgency.

  Nor would the child leave my side until she had seen me saddling Buttons. Then her mission accomplished, without another word she bounded off toward home, streaking across the mission yard, leaping from rock to rock across the creek, running like a brown-legged deer diagonally up across the face of the mountain.

  I followed by the more tedious trail, giving Buttons the rein up the low foothills. But as we reached the first heavily wooded spur from which the path rose steeply, my mare was forced to a slow walk. The rhododendron leaves were still straight and shiny, like summer leaves, not beginning to curl as they usually did in the fall. At moments the silence of the woods was so intense that the patter of acorns falling from the oak trees onto the dry leaves sounded like gentle rain.

  Though Buttons and I had made this trip often, the mare had never been sure-footed on the heights and she was always skittish about the final ascent to the Spencer cabin. As I rode over the crest of the last rise, I saw that all of the children—except John and Zady—were in the yard watching for me, their faces solemn.

  “What a nice welcoming committee,” I greeted them. But there was no joy in their response.

  Clara came to help me dismount. “Been waitin’ for you.” She spoke softly, taking the reins from my hands. “I’ll hitch the post to Buttons.”

  Such a funny way to say it! “Where’s your mother?” I asked.

  “Mama’s inside.” The tall girl’s face was expressionless. She would not look me in the eyes. “She’s abed.”

  I hurried on into the cabin. From the open door, brilliant autumn sunlight spilled across the floor. But the cabin, usually noisy with activity—children’s voices and laughter, kitchen sounds, Jeb’s music—was so quiet it seemed deserted. Then I saw her, Fairlight, lying on the bed, the outlines of her body defined by the quilt tucked in around her.

  Her face was flushed with a heavy look about it that changed her features. Her eyes were open but bloodshot and dull, her head moving restlessly from side to side on the pillow. I felt her forehead. Hot! Incredibly hot!

  “Christy—” One hand crept across the quilt toward me. “You’ve come.”

  “Of course, I’ve come, Fairlight. Why didn’t you send for me sooner?”

  “My side hurts—here—so bad.”

  Her breathing was heavy with such wheezing that I thought she might have pneumonia. But it was so early in the autumn. We haven’t even had any cold weather.

  The children had trailed me into the house and were standing at the foot of the bed, watching me carefully. Their mother held her right hand up in front of her face. “It’s bigged. All swelled up. Why is it so big?”

  I looked at the hand. Perfectly normal except that the skin was so dry that it was pulled taut. Fairlight’s lips, cracked from the fever, were twitching in a strange way.

  “Clara, how long has your mother been like this?”

  “Mama was ailin’, right bad off all last week,” the girl answered. “Complained of a-hurtin’ in the head. Yesterday had the trembles. Shook all over like an aspen tree in the wind. But she wouldn’t t
ake to her bed.”

  “Where’s your father?”

  “Took the hound-dogs, went ba-ar huntin’—over Laurel Top somewheres.”

  “How long has he been gone?”

  The girl thought a moment. “I’m not certain-sure. Left at day-bust, ’twas three days ago, reckon.”

  “Christy—” the voice from the bed sounded desperate. Fairlight raised her head off the pillow to look at me, but I had the feeling that her eyes were not focusing. The pupils looked dilated. “Christy, tell them to take the chairs off’n me. All that house plunder they’re a-pilin’ on me. The chairs—all them chairs. Tell them—They’re a-smashin’ me. Tell them—” She began coughing, a deep racking cough, painful to hear.

  I pressed her hand reassuringly. “Fairlight, there’s no furniture on you, no chairs.”

  “Off’n me, off’n me. Tell them—Christy—”

  “Fairlight, I’m here now. Right here. I won’t let anybody pile anything on you.”

  My heart was thumping and my legs trembling. I must not let the children see my alarm. I forced myself to speak slowly to try to keep panic out of my voice. “Clara, hasn’t anybody sent for Dr. MacNeill?”

  “Mama didn’t reckon to need no doctor-medicine.”

  “How about John? Is he around? Could I send him for the doctor?”

  “Papa carried him ba-ar huntin’ too.”

  At that moment Zady appeared in the doorway, breathless and panting from the long climb from the mission.

  What was I to do? For the girls it was too long a journey to Doctor MacNeill’s cabin and he might not be there anyway.

  “Clara,” I said, “we’ve got to have help. Would you run over to Holcombes’ and get one of the men to go fetch the doctor?”

  Already Clara was at the door. “Say they can use Buttons if necessary. And tell them to try the mill first. Usually one of the men there knows where the doctor is. Oh, and Clara—” The girl stood in the doorway looking at me with large solemn eyes. “Tell them that your mother is really sick. This is an emergency.” She turned and in a moment had disappeared over the brow of the hill.