Spencer's Mountain

by Earl Hamner, Jr.

  “Bless you,” said the minister with a friendly smile.

  Lucy Godlove’s suspicion had become aroused and she stepped forward, put her face up close to the preacher’s face and drew in a deep breath. She turned to the other members of the Ladies Aid Society and announced in a whisper of disbelief, “He’s dead drunk.”

  The ladies withdrew like a flock of hens discovering a rattlesnake in their midst. They reassembled on the road in front of the house and stood looking back at the parsonage in outrage.

  Gradually it dawned on the preacher what had happened.

  “God in Heaven,” he exclaimed.

  “It’s a good thing for you He’s on your side,” observed Clay, “You’re goen to need Him.”

  ***

  The regular Sunday morning service at the Baptist church was not held the following morning. Mr. Goodson arrived a full hour before the meeting was scheduled but he was the first and only soul to arrive. For a long time he waited at the door for someone to come, and he was almost relieved that no one did appear. He was badly hung over. Further up the road the service at the Methodist church had gotten under way and it did not help his spirits any to hear them singing:

  Yes, we’ll gather at the river,

  The beautiful, beautiful river;

  Gather with the saints at the river

  That flows by the throne of God.

  Mr. Goodson wished he had never seen a river. He wished he had never seen New Dominion and he especially wished he had never seen Clay Spencer. His career as a minister in New Dominion had been cut short even before it had begun and perhaps his entire ministry was doomed. He remained at the church until noon and then returned to the spic-and-span parsonage and sat trying to map out some campaign to win back his lost flock.

  It was noon before Clay heard the outcome of his encounter with the new minister the day before. He had fished since early morning and returned home for Sunday dinner in the middle of the day. Olivia’s mother and father had stopped by, as they always did after church on Sunday, and the entire family was sitting on the front porch. From the way his mother-in-law was rocking in her rocking chair, Clay could tell that she was furious.

  “Miss Ida, I want you to know I’m sorry for getten that preacher tight yesterday,” he said.

  “Huh,” said Ida without so much as a look in his direction.

  “I didn’t know he was a preacher until it was too late,” said Clay.

  “What makes me so mad is that just yesterday I was tellen somebody what a good man you were, Clay Spencer,” said Ida grimly. “I could bite my tongue off today. You’ve ruined the Baptists, you’re a shame to the community, and it’s a wonder the Good Lord don’t strike you dead in your tracks.”

  “Aw now, Miss Ida,” said Clay, “it don’t do a man no harm to take a drop once in a while. Even a preacher. And it wouldn’t surprise me if that fellow didn’t do a lot of good for this community. How powerful is he in the pulpit? Did he preach a good sermon?”

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” said Ida. “I went to the Methodists.”

  “That’s right, Clay,” said Olivia in a somber voice. “Nobody went to the Baptist church this morning, not a soul.”

  “Why not?” demanded Clay.

  “Would you want your children goen down there to listen to a drunkard preach?” cried Ida.

  “You mean to tell me not one single hymn-shouten, foot-washen hypocrite showed up?”

  “Clay!” admonished Olivia. “You be careful how you talk.”

  “I just wish I’d known,” said Clay, “I’d have gone down there myself to church.”

  “Yes,” said Ida bitterly, “And just like you said the roof would probably have fallen in.”

  By the middle of the week the Ladies Aid Society had organized itself, and it was decided that they would transfer en masse to the Methodist Church. Olivia told Clay about their decision that night when he came home from work and he was furious.

  “Why that prissy-butted old hymn-shouten bunch of hypocrites!” he roared.

  “Clay!” remonstrated Olivia.

  All through supper Clay was thoughtful, and later in the evening, after he had milked Chance and brought the milk to the house, he set the pail on the kitchen table, and said,

  “I’ll be back around bedtime, Honey.”

  “Where are you goen?” asked Olivia.

  “I got some business to attend to,” he said.

  “What kind of business?”

  “Honey, I got that preacher in this mess. I’m goen to get him out of it.”

  For the rest of the week, instead of going up on the mountain to work on his house during the evenings, Clay would leave the supper table and go calling on his friends and neighbors.

  “Miss Lucy,” he said to Lucy Godlove, “I am not a man that keeps records, but just looken back I can count eleven times I’ve been over here to get your washen machine goen in the last two or three years.”

  “At least that many times if not more,” agreed Lucy.

  “And in all that time I never charged you a penny nor sent you a bill, ain’t that a fact?”

  “Yes, indeed,” nodded Lucy.

  “Well, I’m senden you a bill right now,” said Clay. “I’d appreciate it if you’d go back to the Baptist Church next Sunday mornen.”

  “They’d expel me from the Ladies Aid, Clay,” said Lucy.

  “Don’t you worry about the Ladies Aid,” said Clay. “I’ve fixed enough washen machines and iceboxes and electric-iron cords for the ladies of this town without ever asken for a penny. Now I’m collecten in full and any lady that don’t show up next Sunday at the Baptist Church is goen to get a sizable repair bill from me on Monday.”

  Knowing that his mother-in-law Ida would be a more difficult case, Clay did not go to her at all but instead approached his father-in-law down at the mill.

  “Son,” said Homer, “I’d like to help you out, but I doubt if Ida ever sets foot in the Baptist church again. You know how dead set she is against drinken.”

  “I know,” said Clay, “but I was thinken maybe if you switched back to the Baptists, Miss Ida might feel like she ought to come with you.”

  “I’ll tell you the God’s truth, Clay,” said Homer, “I don’t set too much store in a preacher that drinks liquor myself.”

  “Mr. Homer, that preacher had never touched a drop of liquor in his life before he met me that day,” said Clay, and then compounded his lie by adding, “Another reason I wanted you to get to know Preacher Goodson is he’s part Italian like yourself.”

  “I vow now,” said Homer, who was especially proud of his Italian ancestry; his forebears had indeed been brought to America by Thomas Jefferson, who had hoped with their help to start a wine industry in Virginia. It was one of Mr. Jefferson’s experiments that failed, but several of the Italians he had invited to Monticello stayed on.

  “It was on his mother’s side,” lied Clay, “but he tells me he’s just as much Italian as you are.”

  “I never heard an Italian preach, that’s a fact,” mused Homer. “I ain’t promisen you a thing, Clay, but I’ll have a little talk with Ida when I get home tonight.”

  ***

  On the following Sunday morning Clay stationed himself on the front porch where he was able to see the little road that led off to the Baptist church.

  When Olivia had herself and all the children ready for Sunday school she herded them all out onto the front porch, where she found Clay grinning happily.

  “What are you laughen about, you old possum?” asked Olivia.

  “From the crowd I’ve seen goen by, the Baptist church is goen to have an overflow this mornen,” said Clay.

  “Well, I’m not taken my children down there to hear a drunkard preach,” declared Olivia. “We’re goen to the Methodists.”

  “Honey, I can save you a long walk up to that Methodist church,” said Clay.

  “What are you talken about?”

  “There ain’t goen to be any
service at the Methodist this mornen,” said Clay.

  “How would you know?”

  “Well, I just happened to run into the Methodist preacher the other day and I remarked to him that it would be kind of neighborly if he’d come over and hear the Baptist preacher’s sermon this mornen.”

  “And he’s goen to do it?” asked Olivia disbelievingly.

  “At first he didn’t think much of the idea, but then I started tellen him about a nest of skunks I’ve had my eye on right there behind his church and how I’d been plannen to clean ’em out one of these days and I thought maybe I’d do the job as a favor to him this mornen.”

  “Clay, I don’t know how I can hold my head up in this community. Now you’ve gone and turned the church into a regular circus.”

  “You better get started, honey,” said Clay, “if you’re goen to get there anyways on time.”

  Olivia rounded up the children who had scattered all over the yard and with them in tow hurried toward the Baptist church.

  Shortly Clay heard the strains of the opening hymn floating from the Baptist church across the quiet morning up to his front porch. He wondered if Preacher Goodson had chosen the hymn knowing he would be listening.

  Shall we gather at the river,

  Where bright angel feet have trod;

  With its crystal tide forever

  Flowing by the throne of God?

  In harmony with the voices that drifted up across the hill, Clay’s voice joined in:

  Yes, we’ll gather at the river,

  The beautiful, the beautiful river;

  Gather with the saints at the river

  That flows by the throne of God.

  When the hymn was finished, Clay smiled with quiet satisfaction, rose from his rocking chair and went to the barn to get some tools. He was still humming happily to himself as he walked along the road toward Spencer’s Mountain and the house where at long last he would be able to put in a full day’s work.

  Chapter 5

  The dusk of evening seeped down from the mountains over the meadows of spring and through the blossoming crabapple orchard. The trees were in full blossom and their light perfume was carried on the wind all over New Dominion. The air was cool but, sitting at the base of one of the old trees, Clay-Boy Spencer felt the warmth of excitement and expectation. He felt more than saw the change as the sun slipped away beyond the horizon and left the orchard in the cool blue light of fading day.

  Clay-Boy had come to the orchard to think. Something had happened during the day so unbelievable and so nearly impossible that he needed to be alone somewhere to let his mind absorb the thing gradually.

  In an hour Miss Parker, his high school teacher, and Mr. Goodson, the new Baptist minister, would be coming to the house and the thing would be made known to his parents and then to the community and it would become everybody’s property. But now for the moment it was a secret, a dream that he had never even dreamed before, and suddenly he was standing on the threshold of its coming true.

  Yet much depended on what would happen that evening, and the boy had some misgivings. In the first place it was Friday, and on Fridays his father often stopped at The Pool Hall for a few bottles of beer before coming home. In the second place it was Pay Day and on Pay Day his father always stopped for a beer or two before coming home. It was not that his father ever became mean or ugly when he drank. Some of the men came home in rages, broke all the furniture, beat their wives and chased their children out of the house.

  When Clay drank it only magnified whatever mood he might have been in when he started drinking. If he had been a little sad he would become sadder, cry a bit and hug all the children close and tell them that the world is a cold and bitter place, that a man could work day and night and still never get the time and money to build a house for his babies. If he were affectionate he would hug them all the harder and tell them how much he loved them. If he were feeling jolly he would tell them long ridiculous stories about his boyhood and his adventures in the world.

  No matter what his mood, Olivia would disapprove of his drinking and tell him so with her silence and her look the minute he entered the house. But he knew how to win her over. He would pick her up and waltz her around the kitchen in his arms, tickling her and kissing her until she would shriek, “Put me down, you old fool,” and then he would put her down and shortly she would have his supper ready and lots of steaming black coffee to go with it.

  The sun shifted somewhere out of sight and the light faded again, leaving the crabapple orchard in near-darkness. Clay-Boy rose from his seat against the trunk of the tree and walked out into a little clearing. From this point he could see the center of New Dominion, a small cluster of buildings in a little cup of land between several hills. The commissary, the post office at which his Aunt Frances officiated and the barber shop were dark, but light and movement came from The Pool Hall and the mill where the night shift was at work. Around the core of the village at intervals were the great gaping quarries, pockmarked on every hill and in every meadow.

  Physically it was an ugly place, but the boy had never seen anything to compare it with and he did not know that it was ugly. Yet in his imagination, out of what he had read, from the pictures he had seen in books, he knew that there were other worlds, many places beyond the rim of the mountains and that people lived differently in those worlds and that now by incredible chance a door was opening for him into a different world.

  “I’m going away from here,” he said aloud, and his voice to him seemed as filled with sadness as with victory.

  Faintly the boy heard his name called, but he was not ready to go and he ignored his mother’s summons. He spent a while looking at the schoolhouse where a single light beamed from the seniors’ home room. Miss Parker would still be there, correcting papers or preparing lessons for tomorrow. Again anticipation flooded his mind, his thoughts turned to what would happen that night and he turned homeward.

  He came out of the orchard, crossed the road and, standing under a wisteria-covered arch that covered the front gate, he looked up at his home. It was the same house his father and mother had moved into when they were married. At first Clay had objected to doing anything to improve the place because they would only be there long enough for him to build his own home on Spencer’s Mountain. But then as the children came along and the house on the mountain was slow in materializing, Clay and Olivia had done their best to make the company-owned house into a home. Clay had painted the house and laid a flagstone walk from the front steps down to the front gate. He had put up a fence of sturdy locust posts and heavy wire to keep the children from running into the road that ran in front of the house. He had gone into the woods and brought back young maple trees which now had grown to thirty-and forty-foot shade trees. To the practical improvements Clay made, Olivia added beauty. Bordering the entire yard were her flowers—iris, petunias, daffodils, crocuses, black-eyed Susans. All along the fence ran roses which Olivia had raised from cuttings she had gotten from her neighbors. Over the arch Clay had built for her she trained a wisteria vine that was filled each spring with heavy scented clusters of purple blossoms.

  The thought of leaving saddened the boy. He stood looking up at his home and he felt as if a curtain were being drawn across the scene, cutting him away from his family and separating them from him.

  “You-all come in now, children,” Olivia called. “It’s dark, and in the dark you’re liable to get hurt. Snakes out there this time of night and Lord knows what else you’ll step on in the dark. Come on in now.”

  A screen door slammed shut. His mother’s voice carried on the spring air to the boy and he noticed that her voice was higher than usual, tinged with some vague worry.

  “I’m not goen to call you-all again. Hurry on in, now.”

  Somewhere a baby cried. Somewhere, far off, a dog bayed at the awakening moon. Inside the house he could hear his mother talking to the other children.

  “Everybody sit down now. Supper’s on the
table.”

  The boy walked up the flagstone walk toward the house. So far he had not heard his father’s voice and that could mean either that his father had already gone to bed or that he was not yet home.

  “Where have you been?” his mother asked as Clay-Boy walked into the kitchen.

  “I went for a little walk,” he said, taking his seat on the bench.

  “This was sure some time to take a walk,” said Olivia. “Them people comen here tonight and your Daddy off Lord knows where.”

  “I was hopen maybe Daddy would be home,” Clay-Boy said.

  “You better eat your supper in a hurry and go look for him,” said Olivia.

  “All right, Mama,” Clay-Boy said and picked up his knife and fork.

  “Wait a minute,” said Olivia. “We don’t ever get in such a hurry around here that we forget to say the blessen. Whose turn is it?”

  “It’s my turn,” four-year-old John said proudly. His eyes were big and grave and he turned them now on each person to see if all had assumed the proper air of reverence. Satisfied that he had everybody’s attention and that each child had his hands folded and placed under his chin, he recited in a sing-song:

  Thank you for the food we eat,

  Thank you for the world so sweet,

  Thank you for the birds that sing,

  Thank you, God, for everything.

  Amen.

  A chorus of Amens joined John’s, followed by a clatter as knives and forks, were picked up and each child assaulted the plate in front of him.

  “Becky didn’t say Amen,” tattled Shirley. Shirley was the extremely pretty one. Her long auburn curls fell almost to her waist and even at nine it was plain that some day she would be beautiful.

  “I did too say Amen,” said Becky, the smart one. Her face was thin and her hair bright red. One of her eyes had been blackened recently at school when she had been involved in a fight. The black eye was a great pride to her because she won it protecting Luke from some boys who were bullying him.

  “You did not say Amen,” insisted Shirley. “If you did nobody heard you.”