There Was a Time

by Caldwell, Taylor;

  Frank did not answer. With a blaze and a rush, swelling and rolling, life came back to him as his humiliation and shame became stronger. Now he burned with a pure and vivid anger as he watched Jim and the other Negroes leave the coach. Sight and sound became vivid, immediate. The coach, which before had been only a colored photograph, flat and meaningless, lengthened into dimension. Every wall, every seat, every swaying bag on the racks, had a meaning, a being. The faces of the young soldiers rounded, became the embodiment of something living and significant. The hot white clouds floating in an incandescent sky shaped themselves into forms of purport.

  “Mind if I sit here?” The droning voice broke into Frank’s dream, and he started into wakefulness. He saw the man who was pressing against his knees, a lanky red-faced man with dull and brutal features. The man was dressed in denim overalls, rank with the odor of manure, and over his blue work shirt he wore a denim jacket with metal buttons. A broad-brimmed dusty hat was pulled low over mean and crafty eyes, and his grin revealed broken and yellowed teeth. He sat down beside Frank, pulled out a hunk of tobacco, bit into it, and began to chew.

  The dream retreated. Frank clenched his fists. Again he felt hatred, but not the same hatred as before. Now it was the familiar hatred of disgust and revulsion. Slowly, everything flattened, darkened, paled. Frank pulled away from his chewing companion. Again, he was exhausted, desolate, full of misery. The dream was lost. Moment by moment it became nothing, and moment by moment it was forgotten.

  CHAPTER 45

  Paintsville, Kentucky, in the hot and glaring light of early morning.

  Never had Frank Clair imagined, or experienced, such relentless heat, such blazing heat. Never had he seen anything so dismal and so foreign as this little town. Its very facelessness, its very lack of character, depressed him. His parents had told him that every English hamlet, town and city had its individuality, its distinguishing peculiarities of architecture and streets. His wide reading had taught him that every Continental city was distinct from its sister cities.

  Now he was seeing his first small American town, ugly, characterless, bleak. He had gathered, from Tim Cunningham’s letters, that Paintsville was, in a way, a “settlement,” a frontier hamlet. “The jumping-off place” of the mountains. It had none of the raw and colorful frontier quality of Western towns, as vividly depicted in the moving pictures. It had a hideous little clapboard Methodist church, one perceptible street or two, lined with wooden houses, a “hotel” built of wood, with a gabled roof, a series of cheap-jack “general stores,” a tiny depot, and hot, broken pavements. Even the few trees, dusty, browned by early summer heat, had no freshness, and none of the vigorous green of Northern trees.

  A few buggies, shabby and battered, were hitched before the general stores. Women, in long, chemise-like gingham dresses reminiscent of nightgowns, reaching to bare ankles and feet, and wearing checked pink or blue gingham sun-bonnets, moved along the burning pavements, “totin’” dirty babies on their arms. Yellow curs slunk behind them. Husbands, in overalls and denim shirts, barefooted and wearing battered felt or wide straw hats, chewed and conversed listlessly along the curbs. Frank stared at them curiously. These were certainly not the “Southerners” he had imagined. These, then, must be the “white trash” spoken of by Tim Cunningham and various novelists. But they were not picturesque. They were merely ugly, quite dirty, with faces that, to Frank, accustomed as he was to the more colorful faces of Italians and Poles and Slavs to be seen in Bison, were very odd and alien.

  Most of the men were of an incredible height. Six feet was only average. But they were like weeds, unbelievably thin and lanky. When they walked, they loped and sidled like stringy saplings suddenly given animation. The women were smaller, with peaked dull faces, blank empty eyes and dun-colored hair. It was apparent that most of them were sickly. They coughed and spat copiously. The children were obviously suffering from pellagra, for they had pinched pale faces and swollen bellies, and their legs were misshapen and knock-kneed. One and all were barefoot. It was obvious that most of them were farmers from the nearby countryside, for the better-dressed and leather-shod townsfolk had a plumpness and healthfulness of appearance not to be found among the country folk.

  Paintsville was in the foothills. Beyond the hideous little town Frank could see the dark rolling hills, flattened of top and gentle of slope. Frank was greatly disappointed; his dreams of immense and stony mountains, crowned with brilliant snow, were fading. But, he thought bitterly, that comes of my ignorance. I ought to have known that such mountains can’t be found this side of the Rockies.

  The listless voices echoed in the glaring heat and light. Horses stamped, and clouds of dust arose. Doors of the “general stores” banged. Flies buzzed everywhere. There was a strong stench of manure. The miserable town buildings cast no shadows as a refuge for the strollers and the “jawers” along the littered curbs. The sky shone pitilessly, white with heat and brazen sun.

  Frank, carrying his coat and his big cardboard suitcase, walked to a blacksmith shop, as directed by Tim Cunningham. Iron clanged on iron. The smith, a refreshingly vigorous man, swung his hammer on the anvil. He had a great bearded face, sensual and strong, and Frank thought of a village character in Shakespeare’s plays. He favored Frank with a wide grin which revealed broken teeth stained with tobacco juice, and he wiped his brown forehead with his bare forearm. “Whut kin I do for you, sir?” he asked, courteously, after he had spat a gob of tobacco onto a casual pile of manure near the broad doorway. The stink and heat of the shop almost overpowered Frank, who drew in his nostrils and tried to breathe lightly.

  But Frank liked the man. He heard his own English accent in the other’s rude voice, and he was suddenly pleased. How sedulously, in foreign Bison, he had tried to eliminate his accent, and with what awkward care and self-consciousness! How afraid he had been to speak much at school, to the children of Germans and Italians and other aliens, for fear of their ridicule! Now he could speak without nervousness, and would not be found strange and suspect. The smith spoke, and it was the true voice of America, overlaid slightly with a drone and a languor. The smith, well-fed and mighty of muscle, was, like himself, of pure English stock, the glaring light of his fire reddening his swarthy cheeks, his short curly beard and longish curly black hair. There was no decadence in him, no depravity, such as appeared on the faces of the lounging farm folk on the streets.

  Frank set down his suitcase. He spoke slowly but freely: “I was supposed to meet a wagon, or something, near here. To take me ‘down on Benton.’ Do you know anything about it?”

  The smith squinted, laid down his hammer. He pulled a slab of tobacco out of his overall pocket, and offered it to Frank, who declined politely. The smith sank his teeth into the tobacco, and thoughtfully chewed, as he eyed Frank in a friendly manner. Then he left his anvil, affectionately smacked the rump of a mule near the door, and came up to Frank, staring at him with childlike candor.

  “Whut your name, sir?” he asked apologetically.

  “Frank Clair. I’m a friend of Tim Cunningham’s. Do you know him?”

  The smith studied the young man carefully. Frank could smell his rank sweat, but it did not offend him, for it was the very emanation of health and virility. He was puzzled, however, by the close scrutiny of the smith, and the way the latter’s eyes squinted at him cautiously.

  “Yessir, I knows Tim Cunningham. You say yore name’s Frank Clair?”

  Frank became uneasy, for there was a sudden watchfulness, an alertness, about the smith. “Yes, that’s my name.”

  “Whar you frum, sir?” asked the smith, with more apology in his lusty voice.

  Frank frowned. “From Bison. Up North. What’s the matter, anyway?”

  But the smith stared at him almost cunningly, and was silent. Then slowly, he grinned. He smote Frank heavily on the shoulder. “Reckon yo is the feller Tim spoke about,” he said, and burst into laughter. “Pardon me, sir, but we uns got to be careful. Revenooers comin’ i
n all the time. You ain’t a revenooer, eh?”

  Bewildered, Frank considered. Then his face cleared. “Revenue agents.” He shook his head. The smith grinned wider. He reached behind him, pulled a bottle from his rear pocket, and extended it largely to Frank, who took it uncertainly. “Have yoreself a drink, sir,” invited the smith. “Applejack.”

  He watched while Frank fastidiously wiped the neck of the grimy bottle and tilted it to his lips. The pungent and burning liquid, golden as sunlight, almost choked the young man. The smith was heartily amused, and bent backwards to laugh. “My brother made it,” he informed Frank, when the latter could get his breath. “Cain’t find no better anywheres in the mountings.”

  Now that friendship was on a warm footing, the smith expanded. The mule team was expected momentarily. “Roads still bad,” said the smith. “Cain’t get the lazy sonsabitches to do nothin’ hereabouts to fill in the holes. Just want to jaw around in town.”

  He invited Frank to sit on a bench near the door. He refreshed himself frequently with his bottle as he talked. The mule stamped restlessly. A wagon rolled by on the cobbled street. Sunlight, unbearably brilliant, poured into the dark, firelit smithy. Beyond the door, Frank could see the shapes of the somber “mountings.”

  He learned that the smith had a farm “down on Benton,” some twenty-five miles away. According to the profane smith, it was a “no-account” bit of land. But oil had been discovered on it by Tim Cunningham and his brothers, and was now bringing in three hundred barrels a day. Frank calculated laboriously. Three hundred and fifty dollars a day! Why, then, he asked the smith, did the latter work here? Where would a man go? the smith inquired artlessly. Louisville? He, the smith, didn’t “hold with” the city. Didn’t like it, no sir. This was a purty country, and he’d lived here, man and boy, for forty years. Cities were godless, runnin’ around with wimmen, and drinkin’ on Sundays, and card-playin’, and what all. Theatres, too. The smith shook his head. He could, Frank thought, conceive of nothing beyond his mountain horizon and his bare and simple life. What did he do with his money? Put it right here, in the bank, replied the smith emphatically. What all did a man do with money besides putting it in the bank? It was obvious that he had no knowledge of the “sittlements,” as he designated the outside world, and that he didn’t “hold with” long journeys on the “steam-cars.” When Frank spoke of automobiles, the smith again shook his head. Nothin’ better than a team of good hosses, and he had that team. He lived in a three-room log cabin up the road, and it was big enough for himself, his wife and two daughters. One of the girls, “bright as a button,” was going to Berea College, and she would then teach in Paintsville. The other girl was about to marry a farmer who owned fifty acres of good bottom land. Money as a thing in itself meant nothing to the smith. There was nothing he wanted, and, as he naively said, what more could a man want? More wimmen? Wimmen were a sight of trouble, and his old woman was good enough, or bad enough, for him. Besides, he was an old man now, goin’ on forty-one, and nothin’ but devilment came of a man forgettin’ his age. Books? Well, he couldn’t read a word, thank God, with all the sin there was in books.

  Frank thought of that three hundred and fifty dollars going daily into the bank, to lie there uselessly. He thought of the freedom and the peace such money would bring to him; he thought of the ninety dollars in his own pocket, all that he had in the world. The smith looked at him with his innocent black eyes, shining so brightly in the firelight, and he wondered why this thin young man had such a dark sour face. Reckon the applejack ain’t sittin’ well on his stommick.

  Frank was so lost in his bitter resentments and musings that he was not aware that someone was entering the smithy until he heard the smith’s jovial greeting. A tall thin young man stood there, dressed neatly in a dark “city” suit and black leggings, and wearing a broad-brimmed black felt hat. He moved into the smithy with such an air of quiet elegance and dignity that Frank’s attention was caught.

  “Howdy, Parson!” cried the smith, rubbing his hands on his leather apron. “Purty day, ain’t it? Yore mule’s shod and ready. He’s an orn’ry critter.”

  One of those “circuit riders,” I suppose, thought Frank, a travelling evangelical minister of whom he had read in some forgotten tale of the Southern mountains. He half turned away with disdain when his attention was again arrested by the sound of the young man’s pleasant Western voice:

  “Thanks, Little Les,” he said. He slapped his waiting mule affectionately with the flat of his hand. The intelligent animal nuzzled him. “He isn’t ornery, are you, Boss? He just happens to be bright. Maybe it’s the same thing in the long run. Eh, Boss?”

  The smith, “Little Les,” himself, the “parson,” the “bright” mule, the dark rounded shapes of the mountains outside, the heat, the brilliant sunlight, the alien sounds and smells and forms all about him, struck Frank even more acutely now. His perception, which had become so dim and faint and superficial, sharpened. But as everything rushed in upon him, he became deeply depressed and disoriented, and something like a dull nostalgia made him ache briefly.

  Genial comments about the mule passed between Little Les and the “parson.” Frank listened. The accents in those voices no longer pleased him with their familiarity. He stood, withdrawn, covered with his depression as with a cloud. He had acquired this ability to efface himself, so that, in this withdrawing of his personality, this impositon of a blank neutrality upon his body and his mind, he no longer seemed present. So it was that when Little Les, turning from the “parson,” became aware of him, the smith actually started. “Eh!” he exclaimed. Then he grinned. “Reckon you’ll have the parson along when you go, Frank,” he added. He explained to the other young man: “Feller from the sittlements going down on Benton with Tim Cunningham. Name of Frank Clair. Shake hands with the parson, Frank.”

  The “parson” appeared surprised at seeing Frank, but he extended his hand with friendly candor. Frank, desperately uncomfortable, took that hand. He felt the warm grip of the hard and slender fingers, and in spite of himself, he could not help returning the other’s quiet, open smile.

  “Going down on Benton with the oil outfit?” asked the “parson.” “Well, we’ll be seeing a lot of you. I’m Doctor Wade O’Leary, from Salt Lake City, Utah. A medical doctor, not just a theologian.” His smile was warmer, and Frank’s tension relaxed gratefully. He knows I’m not an ignoramus, he thought. He hardly stammered when he replied:

  “Dr. O’Leary? You’re a minister, too?”

  “Yes. Church of the Latter Day Saints. Some people call us ‘Mormons.’ I’m really a missionary, with my brother, Peter, to the Kentucky mountaineers. We’ve managed to build a little school for the children, where my brother teaches. He takes care of their minds, and I take care of their bodies. And sometimes their souls, when they need it.” Dr. O’Leary laughed lightly, gave Frank’s hand a final sincere grip, and released him. “Best of all, though, we’ve managed to set up a small hospital for the poor women. You’ll find the mountains very educational. Where have you come from, now? You aren’t a Southerner?”

  “No. I’m from Bison, New York.”

  “Oh.” Dr. O’Leary’s expression became thoughtful as he studied Frank. Frank, in his turn, studied the doctor. What he saw pleased and released him still more. Wade O’Leary had an extremely tanned and slender face, the face of an alert and yet reflective scholar, all fine angles and strong, delicate planes. It was evident that he had what Maybelle called “good blood.” His eyes, set deeply in wide, bony sockets, had a steadfast brown brightness under very heavy black brows. His nose, somewhat aquiline and sharp, gave a hawklike vigilance to his face, a still and prideful poise, which was yet paradoxically gentle and considerate. His thin and flexible mouth was also paradoxical, for though the lines of it were extremely firm they were also mobile and quick, and his smile flashed easily and subtly, as if denying the determined jaw beneath. He had taken off his hat, and Frank saw the thin and sculptured contour of h
is small head, with its patrician length and fineness and smooth black hair.

  “You’re a long way from home,” remarked Wade. “You know Tim Cunningham well? He’s a nice fellow. I know his brothers, too. I saw them last about a month ago, before I went back home for the typhoid serum. There’s been a lot of typhoid down on Benton. I also brought some smallpox vaccine. If you haven’t been vaccinated recently, you’d better let me do it for you when we reach Benton. Ten cases of it, before I went back to Salt Lake City. Hope no more of it has broken out in the meantime.”

  “Haven’t they got any other doctors there?” asked Frank apprehensively.

  Wade shook his head. “Only a very old man, who is by way of being a kind of witch doctor. I doubt very much if he ever had any medical education whatsoever. He brews potions and gives cathartics for everything from smallpox to puerperal fever. I’m the only religious advisor down on Benton, too, except for a Holy Roller expert who makes a whirlwind visit every summer and disrupts what I’ve been trying to do for years. But he does add drama to their poor, miserable lives, and I don’t suppose I ought to begrudge it.” He paused and smiled slightly. “You’ll find it another world—Frank. I hope it’ll interest you.”

  Frank, in fact, was more than a little alarmed. He had not thought of Benton as a place in dire need of missionaries and vaccines, of fine devoted men who wished to dedicate their lives to a people and a community which ominously suggested a leper colony. When he had thought of Benton, he had believed it to be a small country town in whose outskirts oil had been discovered.

  Wade O’Leary was speaking in a grave voice: “You’ll learn a lot about the country, Frank. And I’ve found out that whatever a man learns is valuable, though he might not think so at the time.”