The Path Was Steep

by Suzanne Pickett

  David whispered to me, “We don’t have enough to buy gasoline to go the long way home.”

  “So?” I said and began to shake once more. I knew the alternative.

  “We’ll have to take the Jumps again,” David stated.

  I had promised myself that never, so long as I lived, would I ride over that road again—that I would walk before enduring that. But I knew that the six of us couldn’t walk more than a hundred miles. We didn’t even tell Karl and the children. No need to try to tell Papa. No one could tell about that road. You had to ride over it yourself to understand.

  David’s face was grim as we entered the car and headed once more for “the worst road in the United States.”

  14

  Score One for West Virginia!

  Leaving the hills of Virginia, we traveled into the West Virginia mountains. Reaching the Jumps, we screeched around curves, clung to the walls whenever possible, dodged cars, heard the rattle of rocks and shale below, and finally reached comparative safety. Papa stuck his head and neck out the window and stared up and up at the black rocks and trees above, then far below to the chasms on the lower side of the road.

  “Now, now—” he said, his hands waving. “I’ve seen them, and I still don’t believe.” Papa’s head nodded in rhythm to his hands.

  “I told you, Papa.”

  “You tried to tell me,” he corrected. “Nobody could really tell. The everlasting hills,” he said reverently now and then, but he caught his breath and his interest waned as we perched on the edge of chasms, slid, and missed other cars by inches.

  “Hadn’t you better slow down, son?” For the first and perhaps the last time, Papa tried back-seat driving.

  Out of his deep respect, David slowed.

  Once Papa stuck his head all the way out the window to stare. A ladder was fastened to a jutting rock. At that moment, a man stopped hoeing a patch of corn and beans and began to descend.

  “Climbing a ladder to plant corn,” Papa grieved for the man. “No mule could climb it. He must have dug the earth with a mattock.”

  He didn’t talk so verbosely the rest of the way home, but all of his life he told people about the sky-grown corn. “He must gather it and let it roll to the bottom of the mountain,” he said.

  As we veered around the curves of the Jumps, Papa’s hands, corded and brown, were too busy to talk. He clung to the door and the back seat of the car. “If snow were a foot deep,” he said when we finally crossed the Jumps and reached the safer roads that slid around curves towards Marytown, “I’d walk that road at midnight, the coldest night of the year, before I’d ride over it again.”

  We reached home just before dark. Mr. and Mrs. Hauser had been notified; they waited in the yard for us. Karl staggered from the car; they left in a few minutes; and we made it into the house. David built a fire in the stove. I made coffee and took out what was left of the crackers and bread we’d brought from Morris. David gathered tomatoes; I sliced them and opened two cans of beans. We ate, wiped dust from hands and feet, and fell into bed.

  Papa stayed with us a month and loved every minute of it. Incredulously, he walked through our garden, took a handful of dirt, and said, “If I had sixty acres of this soil back home, with our heat, and the rain you have here . . . If I had this soil . . .” He gazed in wonder at the black leaf mold, which had washed down from the mountains for countless centuries.

  Beans were hanging thick in the garden. We’d planted McCaslins, even better than Kentucky Wonders, we thought. Papa asked to gather the beans, refused to take a basket, but stacked them across his arm like firewood. “A foot long,” he marveled, “and as thick as my thumbs.” Along with his corn patch tale, Papa told of our beans.

  We pointed out other glories of West Virginia: dark hemlocks, apples growing wild, mountains full of wild flowers. “Isn’t it beautiful?” I’d ask.

  “Yes, but take Alabama now . . .” Loyally, he always found something better at home.

  “Nights are so hot at home and so cool here,” I’d say just to hear his defense.

  Papa’s fidelity never wavered. “Well, now, takes heat to ripen watermelons.” That silenced me for a time. David’s melons, planted so hopefully, never did ripen to the point of sweetness.

  “We sleep under blankets all summer,” David stated.

  “I’d rather sleep without cover.” Papa was undaunted.

  At twilight the second night, we all sat on the porch. I took sweaters for the girls and put on a coat.

  “Better get your coat,” David advised Papa.

  “A coat? Why, it is almost this cool at home,” Papa said, ever loyal. We talked; Papa chewed his tobacco, David smoked his handmade cigarettes. Chill crept down from the mountains. Papa talked bravely on.

  The thermometer took another drop.

  At last, Papa slipped into the house and returned wearing his coat. “It is just a little cool,” he admitted.

  Score one for West Virginia!

  Davene, in Papa’s lap, nodded her head and flourished her hands in exact imitation of his. But this wasn’t enough like her idol. “Papa,” she said, “you got another chew of that tobacco?”

  Papa met people and talked to everyone. Religion, Alabama, politics, Alabama. An ardent Democrat, Papa seemed to think he’d invented the blaze that was Roosevelt. Yet he was a little kinder to Hoover than most people. “We’ve had Depressions before,” he said. “Panics, we called them. Things will get better.”

  He loved the mountaineers, and they, usually suspicious of “furriners,” loved him in return. Men loved Papa. Women too, especially women, and he had an eye for a pretty face until the day he died.

  Papa liked his whiskey, too. As a child it had always been in his home. Before the mad cry that brought on Prohibition, most homes kept a bottle of the “medicine,” and hot toddies were not immoral. Even my sainted grandmother, as already mentioned, took her hot toddy daily. “I love the taste of whiskey,” she’d say. But her religion prevented her taking more than the one teaspoonful daily.

  Temperance wasn’t so easy for Papa. “My, how Lee could drink when he was young,” Uncle L. B. Clark used to laugh. “Drunk as a lord every Saturday night. And temper! Fought like a tiger. But Lee would never cuss, no matter how drunk he was. ‘You cuss ’em, L. B.,’ he’d say, ‘and I’ll whip ’em.’ And whip them he did. Worst temper I ever saw.”

  Papa’s temper I inherited, his stubbornness and vanity, and added several faults of my own. But he taught us to do the right thing and thought it his duty to tell me the right way, as Mama was gone. “Sue,” he said one day when I was fifteen. His hands were still and his eyes serious. “You’ve got a bad temper. I can’t say a thing against you, for you inherited it from me. But, Suzy, if you don’t control your temper, it will control you.”

  That small lecture did more to help me control my temper than anything he could have said. When David and I were first married, his family marveled, thinking I didn’t even have a temper.

  Another of Papa’s lectures regarded women’s virtue. There was a double standard then. Men and young men were allowed to have experience—there were always plenty of “bad girls”—but a “good girl” was a virgin at her marriage and was forever faithful to her husband. This worked, too. Marriages lasted in those days. So Papa took it on himself to do the duties that Mama would have done. He took me aside one day, hemmed and hawed; finally he said, “Sue, remember, you are a Mosley. In all of our history, there has never been a Mosley woman who went wrong. Remember that.” I was innocent and very naive, but I knew enough to realize what he meant, and I did remember.

  As I said, I inherited Papa’s temper and other faults, but not his love of whiskey. I hated the very smell of alcohol. David certainly didn’t. He had his regular bootlegger, charged his whiskey, and paid every two weeks. He couldn’t hold his liquor, though. One drink, and David had a certa
in look in his eyes. Two, he reeled slightly; and with three or more, he grew tearful, belligerent, or romantic, depending on his current mood.

  Papa’s love for God finally made him realize his weakness. Before his death, Papa didn’t even wish to take the spoonful of sherry his doctor ordered, saying they had done everything they knew to give him an appetite.

  And David, bless him, had “an encounter with God” one night in the Piper Methodist Church, the summer of 1935. The Baptist and Methodist men held a regular weekly prayer service. I’ll never forget that night. David came home a totally changed person; his drinking and his cursing stopped then and there. But he was still David.

  But this was the summer of 1932. “A few drinks won’t hurt anyone,” Papa argued, and David certainly agreed with him. On the days the mine was idle, Papa and David careened recklessly over the mountains, slightly tipsy. The children and I, along for the ride, were tipsy with mountain air and good health.

  Joy, next to being in Alabama, was having Papa with us. He had such a good mind, such a store of knowledge, ideas, curiosity. Life sparkled, was more exciting when Papa was around. Yet I could grow furious with him. We were too much alike not to have a few fireworks when together. We’d talk and argue, then forget our differences and talk again.

  One night Sharon woke vomiting. Sluggish water ran from a hydrant across the street from us. She and Davene would drink from it. She was very sick this night. I bathed her face and used my home remedy of Karo and water. She slept to wake and vomit again. “She’ll be all right when she purges herself,” Papa comforted me the next morning.

  Usually I trusted his judgment, at least for myself. But this was different. I became all worried mother. “I want a doctor,” I said.

  “You know a doctor won’t come this far,” David reminded me.

  “He’ll send her some medicine.”

  “I tell you, she’ll be all right,” Papa said. But I insisted, and they left to see what Dr. Anderson, at Hemphill, would do.

  I washed dishes, fed Davene, made our bed, and poured my home remedy down Sharon. Noon came. Sharon seemed a little better, so I left off worrying about her and began to worry about the men.

  One o’clock passed. I fed Davene and spooned a little soup into Sharon; it stayed. More soup, and she seemed a little stronger. Finally, I bathed and dressed and took the girls next door. “Will you keep the girls?” I asked Mrs. Carter. “I’m afraid something has . . .” I bit back the tears. “I’m going to see what has happened to David and Papa.”

  The shortest way from the valley was across the high train trestle. Foolishly, I took this way and almost paid for it. I heard the lonesome “who-o-o-whooie” of the train as it came through the pass, and I began to run. My high heel caught in a railroad tie. I grabbed both shoes off my feet and raced ahead of the train and barely made it. The engineer hurled curses at me as I scrambled off the track and the train rushed past.

  In the road again, I walked past Twin Crick, then began the climb from the valley and into the mountains. As I walked, I peered over the edge of the road, down to the chasm that lay below. Fenders hung from pine trees and hemlocks; engines littered the rocky cliffs, but there was no sign of Thunderbolt, nor a fresh slide where a car might have gone over the cliff.

  Fearfully, I walked close to the edge and looked below. “This is a nightmare,” I’d think. It isn’t really happening. Blisters formed on my heels, burst, and stung as I limped towards Hemphill.

  A car approached, slowed, and stopped. “Lonesome, beautiful?” a masculine voice drawled.

  I walked faster.

  The car kept pace. “I’ll take you wherever you want to go,” the man said. Then the car stopped, the door slammed, and a big, dark-jowled man confronted me and grasped my arm. Dark hair grew low on his forehead. His eyes were dark-rimmed and bluebird blue. A handsome man until he smiled, then tobacco-yellowed teeth gleamed. His breath smelled of whiskey.

  What to do, I thought. What to do? I couldn’t outrun the man. I tried to smile to keep from infuriating him, and I backed slowly across the road, away from the chasm, toward the high jutting rocks on the other side of the road.

  “Don’t be afraid. I won’t hurt you,” he smiled, showing the yellowed teeth once more. And he followed me across the road.

  As I backed, I stumbled over a large rock that had fallen from the mountain. I stooped and picked it up. “You come one step closer,” I said, “and I’ll kill you!”

  15

  Hot Dogs for Thanksgiving

  The man lunged at me just as a car came around a curve and stopped, and the most welcome voice I ever heard said, “Mrs. Pickett, is this man bothering you?” It was Mr. Hauser.

  “Just offered her a ride.” The dark man turned and hurried to his car, stepped in, and drove away.

  “Where are you going?” Mrs. Hauser’s eyes had a tender, mothering look.

  I began to sob. “I’m looking for David and Papa. They left this morning to go to the doctor. Sharon was dreadfully sick. I—I’m afraid something has happened to them.”

  “Get in; we’ll take you to the doctor,” Mr. Hauser said.

  I climbed in the car and eased off my shoes. It was only a short drive to where another road turned off, and we were able to drive into it, back up a time or so, and turn the car around, headed for Hemphill.

  “I’m going to tell her,” Mrs. Hauser said then.

  “Now, Mother!”

  “Nothin’ wrong with your paw and Dave,” she sniffed. “Just flanderin’ around. Saw them pass with two women in the car.”

  Flanderin’, I puzzled, then, oh, philandering. “Oh, surely something had happened. The woman must have needed help badly,” I said, chiefly for my own benefit.

  “Them kind always gits help,” Mrs. Hauser said. “Pritty as a maggaline*. Your paw was really enjoyin’ hisself, noddin’ his head and wavin’ his hands.”

  I sat numb and stiff until we reached Hemphill; then I ran into the doctor’s office. “The medicine help any?” the doctor asked.

  “David got the medicine, then?”

  “Yes. He and your father and two women . . .” He stopped suddenly, turned, selected more medicine, and I took it back to the car. We said very little as the Hausers drove me home.

  Sharon was sitting in a chair on the porch, definitely better. Davene was on her good behavior. We brought the children home. Sharon slept, then woke, still stronger. I fed the girls more soup, and Sharon seemed almost normal. The Hausers stayed until four o’clock, then left. “I have to milk the cow,” she explained, her voice sorrowful.

  The girls ate a little more soup. I wasn’t hungry.

  At four-thirty, Thunderbolt roared to a stop in his accustomed place. David and Papa, unhurried and unworried, came into the house.

  “How is Sharon?” David asked then, and suddenly his face wore a very guilty look.

  I turned my back.

  “Sue . . .” Papa began.

  “I know! You have been out with two women!” I spat my anger at him. “You left Sharon, dying for all you knew—to ride about all day—all day—with two women . . .”

  “A mother,” Papa told me. “And her sister.”

  “I’m a mother! I had a sick child . . .”

  Papa’s face turned a dull red. “The woman’s baby was dead. They were mountain women—so ignorant—we took them to the doctor and then to the undertaker. She was so pitiful, Sue—walking and crying—”

  “I walked and I cried, too! Her baby was dead. You couldn’t change that, but Sharon was weak and sick. You left her, Papa, you! And David, her own father . . .”

  “I told you Sharon would be all right,” Papa blew his nose.

  “You couldn’t know that!”

  “Sue,” David tried to kiss me. But I couldn’t bear his touch. Couldn’t bear to even look at him. “We had to help them,�
�� he said. “They were from far back in the mountains. So ignorant. She couldn’t even read or write. Her husband was dead . . .”

  “If she ever had one!” Savagely. I left them in the kitchen and went to sit on the porch beside Sharon. What they found for supper I didn’t know or care. And our joy at being together had lost much of its luster. I think Papa was relieved when a letter came from home a few days later.

  “The cotton is white,” he said. “I have to get home to start picking.”

  “Oh, Papa!” In a rush, I forgave him. “Oh, I wish you could stay. No, I wish we could go home!” I cried out my hurt and homesickness until the hurt was all gone. But the wish to move back home was a very big longing in my heart. A useless wish, I knew. Daily, the Depression seemed to grow worse. America was a helpless, hopeless mass of humanity. “Happy Days Are Here Again” was Roosevelt’s theme song. But even that golden voice brought scant hope that summer of 1932.

  “Soon now,” Papa said. “Soon things will grow better. They always do; they always have.”

  “Oh, Papa! You really believe . . .?”

  “Just wait.” That voice I believed. “Soon now. Soon.”

  I was able to say goodbye without tears, without any anger remaining, for I loved him.

  Autumn approached, and the days grew colder. I knew how David would treat the snow-covered curves when driving to work. “We can’t stay here this winter,” I said one morning and poured an extra cup of coffee for David.

  “I’ve already rented a house.” He drank the scalding coffee. “A house and a truck.” The driver came with it. We followed our furniture to Hemphill. I visioned a house on level ground—perhaps the same place as before but without our housemates. David parked Thunderbolt at the commissary, took Davene in his arms, and with Sharon and me following, we climbed a cowtrail of a road that stretched up to where the truck, still loaded, leaned against the back porch.

  A three-room shotgun house, it perched above the commissary and office buildings far below. We could look down and see their roofs. Across that cowtrail was another row of houses. Behind these, the jagged mountains grew almost straight up towards the sky.