The Hinterlands: A Mountain Tale in Three Parts

by Robert Morgan

  The deaconesses Shirley Cantrell and Laura Blaine knelt in front of the first bench, the towels over their shoulders like the sashes of uniforms. On the other side, the deacons Cantrell and Blaine knelt in front of the first row of men. My Daddy stood at the side to follow them, as he was a younger deacon.

  The preacher stood up at the front of the room. “Brethren and sistren,” he said. “If I have ought against thee, if I have offended thee, if I have raised my voice, if I have held a grudge, if I have born false witness, or if I have in any way wronged thee, let the offense be put away. By this act of humility we wash away our petty differences, our spites and proud words. Following the example of our Lord who washed the feet of his disciples, I ask forgiveness for deeds of malice and omission.”

  The congregation begun to sing as the foot washing commenced. You could hear the slosh of water as the washers proceeded along the front benches. I sung too, but my heart wasn’t in it. I wanted to ask Mama what to do, but she was ignoring me. I had got myself in a fix and she was going to let me solve it on my own. I looked around and everybody was singing. The preacher was singing too. Soon as the deacons finished, he would wash their feet. And then the deaconesses would wash each other’s feet.

  I turned around again and it was like everybody in church was looking at me and wondering what I was going to do. Mama had took off her shoes and Mrs. Childress on the other side had took off her shoes. Realus was still watching me. And I even thought Preacher Reece was watching me too.

  Because of my consternation I wasn’t getting no good out of the service. I didn’t feel no fellowship, and no easing away of grudges and fears. I just wanted to get away.

  “I’ve got to go,” I whispered to Mama. It sounded like I needed to answer a call of nature.

  “Are you sick?” she whispered.

  Preacher Reece was looking at me.

  “I’m going out,” I whispered.

  I knowed it was bad to interrupt a service. I gathered up my cloak and stood. Every eye at the meeting was on me. They thought I was having some sort of fit or possession and was going to shout, or maybe speak in tongues. Then they seen me hurrying around people’s feet and knees toward the door. It was like everybody’s feet stuck out in front of me, and I almost tripped myself. Hands reached out to steady me. This is a disgrace, I thought, but I don’t care. I had to get out of there.

  As I got more desperate to reach the outside the faces blurred and all I could see was the door with people standing in front of it. The way out was blocked. Sometimes during a revival meeting when the preaching gets hot and the preacher begins the altar call a big man will stand at the door to prevent the sinners under conviction from running outside.

  But just when I got to the back of the room somebody stood up and pushed the standers aside. I didn’t even look to see who it was. I pushed the door back on its leather hinges and rushed out into the cool Sunday air.

  It was wonderful to be in the open. The air in the valley was different on a Sunday ’cause nobody was working, burning off brush on the creek bank or pounding iron. I could hear the tinkle of our cowbell off in the edge of the woods. I wiped my face on my sleeve. Hadn’t realized I was sweating in the meetinghouse.

  Somebody stepped behind me. They had followed me out of the service. It was your Grandpa, and he stood there in his red shirt looking at me. It had been him that pushed aside the crowd to let me out.

  “I had to get outside,” I said.

  “I seen that,” he said. “I seen all along you was fidgety.”

  That seemed the most tender thing I’d ever heard a man say, that he had felt for me and seen what I was going through. That was when I fell in love, was right there. If I was falling before, that was when I admitted it. My knees was shaky, and I held onto the rail they tied the horses to.

  “You need to cool off,” Realus said. And he took my arm. They was nobody in sight in all the valley because everybody was at the foot-washing service.

  “Let’s walk down to the branch,” I said.

  “But we’ll stay away from the hogpen,” your Grandpa said. I didn’t feel like teasing or laughing a bit. I took his arm and walked toward the stream.

  I never did tell Realus I agreed, but he knowed I had. I wanted to go to the West with him more than anything I had ever wanted. But it scared me to know we was going. Because I remembered how Mama had carried on whenever I mentioned getting married, and how Daddy disapproved of me courting.

  Seemed like their attitude was marriage was just for theirselves and not for younger folks. I never acted like that to my younguns. I never stood in the way of my children courting, when it was with decent people. What’s that? I always encouraged the young to have a good time. It’s one of the blessings of life to go out with those you like when you’re young.

  My Mama used to have a saying: If you can get a girl over fool’s hill she will do all right. I thought I’d got myself over fool’s hill long before, walking home with boys after meeting, kissing in the shadows at infare parties, holding hands after corn shuckings. Don’t laugh children. Your Grandma was young once, hard as it is to see. I used to think that about my elders too. How had they ever been young and gone courting and had fun? Younguns just see their elders as old people, which is what they look like, and usually act like.

  Realus and me walked along the branch, and a little way up the Shimer Road, until meeting let out. By then I knowed I was going with him. I was shuddering too with excitement, and with the thought of talking to Mama.

  “Why can’t we just go on and go to the Holsten?” I said.

  “’Cause I’ve got to get my tools,” Realus said.

  “I’m serious,” I said. “We don’t need to make a ceremony of it.”

  “You’re not serious,” Realus said. “It would grieve your Ma and Pa not to know where you went. And it would grieve you afterward to think you had grieved them.” We walked up to the head of the holler where the cows was grazing below the spring.

  “We’ll have our own cows in our own meadow,” your Grandpa said. “And our own chicken house with hens and a rooster.”

  “I want some banty hens,” I said. “And some of them little Cornish hens.”

  “I want a great big Dominicker rooster,” your Grandpa said.

  “And I want a guinea or two,” I said. “I like to hear them pottaracking across the valley of a morning.”

  We must have stood there talking like that for half an hour, putting off going back to the house. We listed all kinds of things we wanted in our homestead, from spinning wheel to candle molds. We got carried away.

  “It’ll take us ten years to accumulate and make all that,” your Grandpa said.

  “Specially if we have to bring it all the way to the Holsten,” I said.

  “They’ll be stores opening up in Watauga,” he said. “And besides, we have all the rest of our lives to fix up the place.”

  We started walking back down the branch. I felt a cold pain down my spine just thinking about my Daddy.

  When we got to the house Mama was boiling mush at the fireplace. A chicken was baking on the spit.

  “Your Mama’s having to fix dinner all by herself,” my Daddy said.

  “We went for a walk,” I said.

  “You hadn’t ought to run out of service,” Mama said.

  “I was too young to have my feet washed,” I said.

  “But you’re not too young to go off walking up the branch,” Mama said.

  “Mr. Jarvis,” Realus said. “And Mrs. Jarvis.”

  Everything got quiet in the house. Young Henry set on the steps to the loft. Realus still stood by the door. Our eyes hadn’t adjusted to the dark inside.

  “Mr. Jarvis,” he said. “Petal and me are thinking about getting married and going off to the West.”

  “I didn’t think you was studying on settling here,” Daddy said.

  “I’ve done got a place there,” Realus said.

  “I never looked for my girl to be to
ok away to the Holsten,” Daddy said.

  “You said yourself they’s wolves and Indians there,” Mama said.

  “I ain’t afeared,” I said.

  “I’m afeared for you,” Mama said.

  You younguns laugh at me for talking about courting and such. But you’ll be old one day looking back on your youth. Your Grandpa and me was just kids then. Young people always feel like they’re making the world new. I guess they have to feel that way. They have to feel they are the first to find the right way. It don’t help to know your elders was once young and in love and done outlandish things. Better to think of yourself launching out into new places where nobody’s ever been before.

  We was planning to go out into the new country. That’s why I was thrilled more than I was scared. What young girl wouldn’t be excited, to have a man like your Grandpa and the prospect of going off to the new land of the Holsten? Soon I would have my own place. And I was a healthy girl. I wanted to have me a family.

  We didn’t get nowhere talking to Mama and Daddy. I could see they never would agree for me to go off to the woods of the West. They depended on me as their oldest child, and they hadn’t raised me to run off where they would never see me again, and where they would never see their grandchildren.

  “Why don’t you all come to the Holsten?” Realus said to my Daddy. “They’s a need of smiths there.”

  “I’m too old to pick up and go,” Daddy said. “I cleared up land and settled here, and I’m too old to do it again.”

  “Them that goes now will be the rulers and landowners,” Realus said.

  “Them that goes now will die of the wolves or the milksick,” Mama said. Milksick was something that always come to her mind when they was danger or fear. Where she growed up in Virginny, they was lots of milksick, and places in the coves they fenced off in milksick pens ’cause that was where they thought the cows caught the sickness. Some people said it was a weed like nightshade, and some people said it was a vine or creeper the cow eat that poisoned the milk. But others swore it was some mineral in the ground, or a swamp gas that leaked out and was breathed by the cow. My Daddy used to say there wasn’t no such thing as milksick, and that made Mama really mad. That’s why he said it. “How come so many have died of it?” she’d say.

  “People is always dying of something,” my Daddy would say.

  “You’ll think there ain’t no such thing if it ever touches your family,” Mama would say.

  “If milksick will kill you why don’t it kill the cow?” Daddy would say. But no matter how much Daddy argued, Mama still lived in deathly fear of milksick. And from time to time we heard rumors of people dying back in the hollers. They was patches all over the mountains fenced off where somebody’s cow was supposed to have got the milksick. They was like the Devil’s Acre, fenced off to never be used.

  “I’ve heard the water of the Holsten ain’t fit to drink,” Mama said.

  “My spring’s good as any on this side of the mountains,” Realus said.

  “It don’t become a daughter to think of leaving her folks forever,” my Daddy said.

  “A girl has to have her own life,” I said.

  “A girl that forgets her family will be forgot by her own children,” Daddy said, turning the talk sad and grim, like he was quoting Scripture. That’s the way my Daddy done things. He would talk around nice as you please, and then suddenly he would take a stand. And they was nothing going to move him from that stand.

  Realus didn’t say no more. They was nothing to be gained by fussing. I helped Mama bake the chicken, and we had dumplings for Sunday dinner. That was Daddy’s favoritest dish. But he didn’t seem to enjoy it. The foot-washing service had been ruined by his daughter, and now his dinner had been ruint too. And he had spent the week making tools for the man that wanted to carry her off to the West.

  Realus and me didn’t say nothing else about going away, ’cause we seen Mama and Daddy would never agree. But parents ought to know you can’t stop a girl that wants to get married. The truth is you can’t do nothing with a girl in love. A young girl in love has a will to override any opposition. In fact, opposition seems to strengthen her determination. It’s the way the Lord has made women I guess, so they’ll get married and keep the population going. A girl that’s in love don’t want to help herself.

  We didn’t talk no more about the West, but we started planning to get our stuff together and go. We’d have to leave in the night to be far gone by the time Mama and Daddy missed me. That would take some preparation, because we had to carry all our things and travel fast. Besides my clothes and cloth and sewing things, and some cooking things, pots and pans heavy and loud to carry, Realus had to take his tools and seeds. He didn’t have but one horse and couldn’t afford no more. We was going to have to walk to the Holsten, and let the horse carry everything in packs.

  I got me a good pair of shoes. I got Old Man Parker that lived down the branch to make them. I traded him a sack of goose feathers I’d saved to make a feather bed. It would have been good to have the feather bed in the West, but I couldn’t walk there without strong shoes. I don’t know if Mama suspicioned anything or not when she seen the shoes, almost heavy as a man’s. If she did, she didn’t say a thing. Women are smarter than men about situations like that. They know when it’s no use to talk, where a man will jump in ’cause he has to speak, bless his heart. Those shoes was made of shiny calf leather, and when I pulled them on I felt I could walk to the far ocean if I had to.

  All week I tried to think of things I’d have to have in the West. We don’t notice the things we use because we have them all the time. Spoons you can cut out of wood, but a thimble and needles you have to take. A frying pan and kittle you have to take. A bolt or two of cloth would be worth its weight in diamonds over the mountains. A gourd full of salt was a must, even though they are licks in the West where salt can be boiled from the spring water. Tea I knowed Realus would bring from the store down in Charlotte, ’cause he was fond of his cup more than any man I ever seen. You start thinking of the things you use every day, and the list could go on forever, what with little things like beeswax and blueing and pneumony salve.

  But the opposite is true too. It’s amazing how little you need to survive in the woods. All you have to have is yourself and your man to start over, and your health. A woman carries in her body everything else she needs to make the future generations.

  We didn’t have no sweetening then but honey and the maple sugar they made in the high mountains. Long sweetening didn’t come till later. You could buy sugar, but it wasn’t a necessity.

  Was I nervous about running away? Of course I was scared about leaving home. I was a respectful and obedient girl for the most part. And was I worried about marriage? Every girl is worried about marriage, ’cause it’s all unknown to her. If a girl ain’t been with a man before, she waits for her husband to teach her about marriage. But a girl has to trust herself and her man. It’s the thing she wants to do more than anything else, to get married, and to trust her man.

  So I put together two bundles of things, everything I thought I had to have on the Holsten. I put them under a quilt in the attic where me and little Henry slept. Mama never did climb up to the attic, and I reckoned she wouldn’t notice one of her thimbles was gone and three needles. Realus was going to get some needles down at the store, but I wanted some spare ones in case he forgot. He was more apt to remember fishhooks than needles.

  Four or five times a day I went up to the attic and took things out of my bundles and put things in. They wasn’t room for but one quilt, and I knowed it would be a long time before I could piece together another one in the woods. Aunt Docie had give me that quilt for when I was married, and I didn’t want to steal none of Mama’s. Your Grandpa and me would have to make do with a buffalo robe or such as we could find in the West.

  Mama seen me going up and down the steps more times than usual. When Henry wasn’t around I’d go up there to sort my things again.

&
nbsp; “Why you keep running upstairs?” Mama said.

  “It’s time for some spring cleaning,” I said, halfway answering her and halfway not. I wasn’t sure I was fooling Mama.

  We made our plans to leave on a Saturday night. They was nearly a full moon then that would be good for traveling. And somehow it seemed easier to get away on a Sabbath day than on a work day. By the time people woke up and got ready for meeting, we could be way up the road.

  Realus said he would have the horse loaded up and waiting down by the branch at midnight. I worked all day Saturday thinking, by this time tomorrow I’ll be well on my way over the mountains. Everything around the place seemed dearer to me, knowing I wouldn’t see it no more. I wanted to hug Mama and Henry, but it wouldn’t have looked right. I never thought of hugging my Daddy, because he wasn’t the hugging sort of man. I almost cried when I went to the spring, thinking I wouldn’t taste water again from the spring that come from under the poplar.

  Everybody washed up on Saturday night as usual, and I went up to the loft and pretended to be asleep. It took forever for my Daddy to finish up with his bath, and throw out the water and go to bed. They was a crack in the logs and I tried to look out to see if Realus was down by the branch. I waited and waited for the clock downstairs to ring twelve. Seemed like my heart was going to jump out of my chest if I had to wait another minute.

  What do you say? Did we plan to get married?

  Your Grandpa said we’d stop at the first settlement we come to and get a preacher to marry us. Or if we didn’t see one on the way, he’d get the first circuit rider that come through to say the ceremony. He didn’t mean for us not to be legally wed. But it was different then. Being married in the sight of God means you made your vows to each other, and in your heart. Back then you had the official ceremony when you could. That’s the way you funeraled people too. You buried them when they died and then when a preacher come through in the spring or summer he performed the service. When a preacher come to some places, they’d be four or five funerals to conduct and maybe half a dozen couples to unite in marriage, though they might already have children.