Spencer's Mountain

by Earl Hamner, Jr.

  Then there was silence again while Clay got into his work clothes, broken at last when he made his way down the stairs, through the living room and into the kitchen. Once in the kitchen Clay set about building the fire in the old wood cooking range, drenching each stick of wood with kerosene to make the fire start quicker. Then when the fire roared up the chimney he dressed in a heavier coat to go out and milk the cow and feed the pigs.

  With the milk pail in his hand Clay tiptoed back to the foot of the stairs and called softly, “Sweetheart.” It was his name for Olivia and the only thing he ever called her at that hour. And she whispered, “All right. I’m awake.”

  By the time Olivia reached the kitchen, Clay had gone to the barn. Soon the aroma of strong black coffee drifted up the stairway to where Clay-Boy lay, and the tantalizing smell of fried lean bacon, the bubbling, spattering, hissing sound of fried eggs, and all the warm rich sunny smells of biscuits baking.

  Clay announced his return from the barn by placing the pail loudly on the kitchen table. Then Olivia strained the warm foamy milk into Mason jars, placed them in the refrigerator and sat down to breakfast with Clay.

  While they ate they talked quietly and the sound of their voices floated up to Clay-Boy.

  “Clay-Boy’s goen to need money for his class ring soon,” his mother said. “I put a down-payment of three dollars on it when they ordered them, but there’s twelve more has to be paid when the rings come.”

  “I’m senden that boy through high school to get an education,” said Clay. “What the Sam Hill does he need a ring for?”

  “It’s like a sign,” explained Olivia, “something to show he graduated.”

  “What does he need a sign for?”

  “Well, he can walk in some place and ask for a job and the minute the man sees that ring on his finger, he’ll know he’s a high school graduate and that’ll put him ahead of the ones that aren’t wearen one.”

  “A ring is somethen pretty to go on a woman’s hand is my way of looken at it,” said Clay. “Clay-Boy don’t need any ring to show he’s graduated from high school. It’s what they put in his head that counts.”

  “He’s goen to be the only one in the class that won’t get a ring, then. You want him to be different from the others?”

  “You’re A–1 right I want him to be different. I want him to make somethen of himself. The rest of ’em ain’t goen to amount to a hill of beans. But Clay-Boy’s goen somewhere in this world.”

  A man who had been to school only a few days in his life, Clay had an incredible respect for learning. In New Dominion it was a rare thing for a boy to graduate from high school because extreme youth was no barrier to finding a job with the company. Most boys dropped out of school once they passed the seventh grade to take a job, either to earn their independence or to help with the support of the numerous brothers and sisters. Long ago Clay Spencer had ruled out this possibility for his own sons and daughters. “I’ll give ’em what I was too big a fool to get,” he would declare. “Them babies of mine will get a high school education.”

  Now the first installment of his dream was drawing near. Clay-Boy, the only boy in a class of thirteen seniors, was due to graduate on the first of May.

  “I know it’s sinful to wish for somethen that just can’t be,” said Olivia, “but it would be my heart’s craven to see that boy go on to college.”

  “He’s got the brains for it,” Clay nodded.

  “No use day-dreamen,” said Olivia as she rose from the table to begin preparing the children’s breakfast.

  “Goen to be a nice day, looks like,” said Clay. “There’s the sun comen up.”

  A ray of sun sent a pencil of light into the room where the boys slept. Clay-Boy, careful not to wake his brother Matt, who slept beside him, rose from the bed and went to the window to watch the sun come up.

  His window overlooked an orchard of crabapple trees. Clay-Boy pretended to himself that they had been planted by Johnny Appleseed, and there was no reason why they could not have been. Now in the first light of a spring morning a curtain of light fog was lifting from the orchard. Already the tender green leaves were glistening on the trees, disguising the heavy gnarled old trunks and branches with their color and shape.

  Suddenly a flock of goldfinches flew into the orchard, thousands of little golden bundles that might have been flung from the morning sun into the pale green fog-damp orchard. They would cling to the young branches, fill the air with their canary-like warblings long enough to announce the new day and then disperse to their separate chores of eating or singing or courting. Each spring they came to the orchard and some mornings they came in such number that the pale green leaves would be concealed and the trees would become a swaying mass of gold and singing.

  Clay-Boy watched the gold-green singing morning until he heard his mother’s voice calling from the foot of the stairs.

  “Breakfast, everybody! Breakfast!”

  Clay went to the center of the room and pulled the cord that turned on the single electric bulb hanging from the ceiling. The glare of the bulb revealed two beds in the room. The one in which Clay-Boy had slept contained his next oldest brother, Matt. In the other bed, huddled together in a single blanket-covered lump were his next three brothers, Mark, Luke, and John. Clay-Boy gave each sleeping form a nudge, then crossed the hall, went into the girls’ room and switched on the light. There, in two more beds, were Becky, Shirley and Pattie-Cake. There was another child, but he slept in a baby bed in the room with his father and mother. His name was Donnie; he had not grown old enough to have much impact on the family and was referred to mostly as the baby. When he was satisfied that the girls were awake Clay-Boy went down to the kitchen. One after another the brood followed.

  “Lord God Almighty!” said Clay as he sat at the head of the table and looked at his assembled offspring, “I never saw so many beautiful babies in my life.”

  There were nine of them in all. Each one had red hair, but on each head the shade was a little different. Clay-Boy’s hair was the color of dry corn shucks. Mart’s was the red of the clay hills. Becky’s long curls were the pink of a sunset; Shirley’s plaits were auburn. Luke’s hair was the russet of autumn leaves. Mark’s was reddish-blond. John’s ringlets were a golden red and Pattie-Cake’s little ponytail was an orange red and the baby had so little hair it was hard to tell what shade it might become. The shade could be from dark to light, the color was predictable.

  Each of the children was small of bone and lean. Some of them were freckled and some were not and some had the brown eyes of their father and some had their mother’s green eyes, but on each of them there was some stamp of grace of build and movement, and it was this Clay voiced when he said, as he often did, “Every one of my babies is a thoroughbred.”

  They were assembled at a table nine feet long. Clay had built it himself, and it was flanked on each side by wooden benches. There was ample room at the table for all the children and even room left over; friends or relatives who happened to drop in around mealtime were sincerely welcomed. During the summer hardly a meal went by when, squeezed in among the Spencer children, there weren’t two or three of the neighboring children taking advantage of the Spencers’ sprawling hospitality, however frugal their means.

  “Look at them babies,” said Clay. “You ever in your life see anything prettier than that?”

  Olivia looked up from the pan where she was frying eggs to each individual’s liking and said, “I wish I could keep ’em that way. If I had my wish in this world my children would never grow up. I’d just keep ’em little the rest of their lives.”

  “I remember one time when I was a little old tadpole boy,” said Clay, “I had this little baby duck. Mama’s got a picture of me somewhere holden that duck. I used to think that little web-toed quacker was the prettiest thing I ever laid eyes on. Just hated the day to come for that duck to grow up. One day I got the fool idea that if I’d squeeze that duck hard enough every day I could keep him from growe
n, so every mornen I’d nearly squeeze the tar out of him. One mornen I squeezed him too hard I reckon, because he up and died, but it taught me somethen. You try to keep a thing from growen and it’ll die on you.”

  “Still I hate to see my children grow up and leave me,” said Olivia. “You just never know what’s goen to become of ’em.”

  “My babies will turn out all right,” said Clay. “They’re thoroughbreds.” He looked over his brood fondly and when his eyes met Clay-Boy’s, he said, “I’m goen to work on the house this mornen, son. I want you to help me.”

  “All right, Daddy,” replied Clay-Boy.

  The house was not really a house but a dream Clay had. It was his dream to build a house with his own hands, a house his wife and children could see being constructed, a house that would give strength and love to their own lives because they had seen the strength and love with which it was built. He had promised the house to Olivia on their wedding night and had shown her where he would build it, on the summit of Spencer’s Mountain in the same spot where his mother and father’s old cabin had long since rotted away.

  The site was important because it had a history. In 1650 two gentlemen of the Tidewater, Abraham Wood and Edward Bland, seeking a new fur-trading field, had made a journey of exploration into the western mountains. A member of the party, Benjamin Clayton Spencer, came upon a mountain where the earth teemed with richness and which was filled with all manner of game. On the summit he built a small lean-to and returned there the following spring with his wife and children to make it his home. From that time the mountain had been family property and was known as Spencer’s Mountain.

  Clay’s father, Zebulon, had brought his bride, Elizabeth, to the mountain when they were married, and there they raised their family and tended their crops as generations of their people had before them. Zebulon and Elizabeth were people of the mountains, and events in the outside world mattered little to them. They received little news or none at all unless an itinerant preacher stumbled into the settlement, exchanging sermons for food, or performing a wedding for a couple down in the hills whose oldest child might be two or three years old. Sometimes they would hear of the outside world from a passing peddler who had lost his way. The peddler would sleep in the barn and go on his way quickly, knowing he was among frugal people who felt no need for his bright tin pans or gaily patterned dress fabrics. Elizabeth used the iron skillets her mother had given her when she was married, and her dresses she made from wool she carded herself.

  So it was that when a stranger came into the mountains he told his stories to a polite audience. And Zebulon and Elizabeth in those early times, when they heard of the death of kings, the rise and fall of some country across the sea, victories in war, discoveries in medicine, the election of presidents, received these tidings the way they had as children listened to stories told by the old, only half believing and not caring in the least.

  They lived in a small pocket of civilization. Time flowed by them and made little difference to them. Zebulon raised his own corn and sweet potatoes, onions and turnips, and supplemented them with game. He made his own whiskey, and Elizabeth brought forth her young with the help of a sister who had come to be with her or a hastily summoned neighbor from down in the hills if Zebulon could find one in time.

  On a morning before the century had turned, a stranger made his way up the mountain and spoke of a curious kind of stone Zebulon had noticed all through the mountain and down in the hills.

  “It’s called soapstone,” the stranger had said. “It’s impervious to acid, which simply means that acid can’t eat through it. That makes it ideal for laboratory sinks, kitchen and laundry sinks. It can also be used architecturally as flagstone or even in the construction of buildings. We plan to quarry the stuff and came to see if you would sell your land.”

  Zebulon had refused to sell the mountain even though his neighbors down in the hills sold their farms one after the other. The people were promised that once the company could get them built they would move into fine new homes, at only token rents where they could enjoy—many of them for the first time in their lives—such conveniences as plaster walls, central heating and indoor plumbing.

  Eventually Spencer’s Mountain became an island of privately owned land surrounded completely by company land. In the shadow of the mountain a stone quarry was opened and the settlement which grew up around it was given the name New Dominion.

  Then the people who had sold their land came down from the surrounding hills. First came the lean tall men, their worn overalls faded a light blue from many washings in strong homemade soap. Then came their women, stringy, silent and reserved, cautious in their speech, bringing with them flocks of children, shy at first, clinging to their mothers’ dresses, but curiosity winning over their reserve.

  All around them were the nail-and-hammer sounds of building, the smell of fresh lumber, the churning of mud as more horses came into the busy area. Sometimes a lone horse carried a woman and three or four children while the husband walked alongside. Others pulled buggies or, more frequently, wagons laden down with entire families and with their possessions.

  The little village took shape according to no organized plan. The houses were built on company land as the land was acquired and any cleared space served as a homesite. Each of the houses was uniformly ugly, three rooms downstairs and three rooms upstairs. Their roofs were covered with galvanized tin, and while every room of each house received one coat of white paint the outsides of the houses were left natural raw clapboard which over the years turned a soft worn gray that was oddly beautiful and warm.

  With the company commissary as its nucleus a small business community began to develop—a livery stable, a barber shop; a long two-story building with living quarters upstairs and a room downstairs lined with stools and counters became the New Dominion Hotel and Restaurant. Because beer was served in The Restaurant it became an unspoken law that no good woman ever went there. In a room next door a billiard table was installed and it became forevermore known as The Pool Hall, the first place a woman sent her oldest child to look for her man if he did not return by a reasonable hour on payday night.

  So there came into existence an odd little pocket of humanity clustered together in the rolling hills that led up to the Blue Ridge Mountains. It remained a small and isolated hamlet inhabited by hill people who brought their hill ways with them. The first thing a man did once he was settled with his family in his new house was to build a barn, a chicken house and a pigpen in his back yard; behind that or on some nearby slope he would plant a vegetable garden each spring. Rather than reaching out to the larger communities of Charlottesville, Lynchburg or Richmond for entertainment they enjoyed themselves with square dances on Saturday night and Sunday school and preaching on Sunday. Rather than shopping for clothing in the cities that were within reach they bought through the local commissary or ordered from Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward.

  For a while the Spencer family remained aloof and apart from the little village, but gradually they became dependent upon it and a part of it. At first the boys would come, all nine of them, drunk and shooting their guns like cowboys and scaring people out of their wits at night. Sometimes the boys would appear and stand silently against the wall of The Dance Hall and, until one of them decided he wanted to dance, there would be a nervous and apprehensive feeling in the room because they might just as easily decide they wanted to fight. They did both with equal joy and vigor.

  As each of his sons became twenty-one Zebulon would give him his choice of land so that by the time Clay, the youngest, was twenty-one years old the mountain had been divided into nine plots and Clay fell heir to the original cabin and lived on there with his father and mother. Virgil was the first to sell his land to the company, put the money in his pocket and go off to see the world. Rome married a girl from the village who was never happy on the mountain, and at her urging he took a job with the company, sold his land and moved into a company-owned house. The ot
her boys followed suit, and when Clay came down from the mountain to a company house and a job in the quarry he brought with him his mother and father. Only he of all the boys held onto his share of the mountain.

  As the years went by, the vision of the house he would some day build never left Clay’s mind. Every time he passed the site he would imagine the house. In his dreams it was always painted white, the windows trimmed with green shutters and a wisp of smoke trailing from the chimney into the blue sky. The vision was so real to him that he could almost hear the children’s voices inside or see Olivia’s face at the window.

  Yet, as strong as this vision was, he had never gotten beyond excavating the basement; this he accomplished every summer, only to have it fill in again during the fall and winter rains. Each summer he would attack the hole again with the intention that this year he would at least get the foundation laid during the week ends when he did not have to work at the mill.

  Clay would have accomplished a good deal more on the house had he not been such a good-hearted man. Often he would plan to spend a day working on the house but pass it instead repairing a washing machine for a neighbor or helping a friend saw wood or slaughter hogs. Clay was good with mechanical things. There was nothing he could not repair. Since appliances were hard to come by for most of the New Dominion folk, they were held together by bobby pins and glue, spit and imagination until the absolute end of their usefulness was reached and even Clay Spencer could no longer make them work again.

  Even though the demands on Clay’s time were heavy, eventually a day came when he would announce to the family that he was getting back to work on the house. The news always brought pleasure to Olivia and the children because it marked for them a new season of hope, an assurance that everything might improve magically, for if Clay’s faith that the house would be built was so strong, then it was possible that other dreams might come true too.