The Hinterlands: A Mountain Tale in Three Parts

by Robert Morgan

  As we come into the little clearing by the creek, leading our tired horse, it was evening and the sun coming in strips across the ground from the tops of trees. A gladness shot up inside me. The red cloth of your Grandpa’s shirt seemed to get brighter as he pointed to the cabin, and I loved every inch of his strong figure as he showed me the cleared ground. The prospect of staying put the next day, and the next, for the rest of my life, seemed all of heaven I needed then. I wanted to have a house and hearth. They seemed no happiness but staying in your own place.

  I should have been horrified at how little the cabin was. You can’t remember, but we used it for a shed when your mamas and daddies was little. That’s all we had to live in at first. They wasn’t hardly room to turn between the bed your Grandpa had built in the corner and a bench in front of the fireplace, and the shelf that served as a table.

  I see you all grinning because I’ve talked so much of the old hard times. But they was real. Even what I’d had at the settlement was luxury to what I found on the creek. We had to start from scratch, and nobody but a healthy ignorant girl could have done it.

  That cabin had been left damp for more than two months. Snow had blowed in and wet the blankets, and a polecat, I reckon it was a polecat, had got in and chewed up everything, and got into the gourds and sacks. It was a scene to quell the bravest soul, much less a girl lost in the woods far from her family.

  Your Grandpa looked at me like he wished I hadn’t glimpsed what was inside. “I’ll make a fire so’s we can see to clean up,” he said. “You set out here and rest.”

  “I ain’t going to set out here and rest,” I said. The clearing was getting dark fast.

  “It will just take me a little while,” Realus said.

  “It’ll take you twice as long if I don’t help,” I said.

  I gathered some sticks in the woods, and just as it got dark he started a fire in the little fireplace. You never seen such a rough fireplace as that. They was a polecat smell in the place, or maybe it was the must and mold that had took on the spilled corn and flour. Everything looked blue and brown with mildew.

  I got some water from the creek to boil grits and we still had a little squirrel meat saved from the morning. While the water was heating, Realus cleared away the trash from the floor and throwed it outside.

  “Don’t throw away nothing we can use,” I said. “They’s no way to get any more.”

  “A little mold will spread to everything,” he said. “Better to clear it all out before we unload the horse.”

  “Hot water and a touch of turpentine will take care of mold.”

  We eat on the bench with the pot of grits between us and the squirrel meat mixed in. The hot grits was better than sweet cake and custard, I was so hungry.

  “Wish they was some butter,” I said.

  “We’ll get us a cow this summer,” Realus said. “We’ll have a whole herd of cows.”

  “Where we going to get a cow if they’s nobody else around?” I said. “You going back to bring one across the mountains? A month going and a month coming?”

  “I’ll get us one,” your Grandpa said. And that struck me as curious, that he sounded so certain of getting us a cow.

  Lord, the work we done that spring. Nobody but a young and foolish girl would slave that hard. We didn’t hardly have no tools except the broadax and the big grubbing hoe. Realus had brought a plow point from my Daddy’s blacksmith shop, and he hewed out a kind of plow from white oak and bolted the point on. But it was just a bull-tongued plow. It wasn’t no turning plow.

  You just think of starting a place from scratch in the woods with practically nothing but your bare hands. The patch your Grandpa had cleared in front of the cabin wasn’t no bigger than a chicken run. Most of it had been a kind of ramp meadow before. A man is not going to clear land in the wilderness unless he has a woman to look after him and help him. A man by hisself will just hunt and go his way. You might say he clears up land for the woman. Either way, it’s a mountain of work for both of them.

  They was mornings when we started out that it seemed we could move the earth with our own hands. If it was just a matter of digging, we could have dug the ground out level and carried the rocks and throwed them into the creek. I felt like I could shape the dirt with my fingers, the way we did as children, playing in the sand. I felt like the earth was here for us to use, the black soil and the yellow underdirt. The ground just needed cleaning off and flattening to be our play yard.

  That spring me and Realus deadened a whole stand of trees down along the creek where Lewis’s place is now. We girdled every tree so’s it wouldn’t put out no leaves. Where we cut the bark, sap kept coming up from the roots and bubbling out, especially the poplars. It looked like some kind of brew soaking out and the early flies and gnats and even some butterflies come to drink the sap before it soured and turned black.

  We didn’t have time to cut the trees down that first summer. It was corn-planting time, and after we ringed the trees to make sure they wouldn’t put out no shade leaves, Realus tried to scratch up the ground under them to plant. But you know what it’s like in the woods, with leaves and sticks on the ground, and roots just underneath. You can’t hardly plow. The bull-tongued point catched on one root after another. It’ll rupture a man if the plow handle hits him in the belly when the point jams on a stob. I’ve heard of men killed or maimed that way. What you have to do is grub out the roots with mattock and big hoe and pull out the little roots like lacings and gristle. But we didn’t have time for much of that.

  We done what a lot of people did back then. Stead of planting in rows we put our corn in hills. What you do is pick a good spot and dig it up and plant four kernels. That way you’ve got hills scattered all over in the best places. And you come back and hoe the separate hills, keeping the weeds away from them.

  Ever wonder why we growed so much corn here? It’s because corn grows faster than the weeds around it. You plant it in hills, not broadcast or drill it like small grain, like oats and rye. And you can bust corn up in little mills if you have to. You can grind it in a tub mill, or even crush it in a mortar like the Indians. You harvest it by the ear. Don’t need no scything or thrashing. And you can eat corn when it’s in the milk, which you can’t with small grains. And think of all the ways you can use corn, as roastnears, as creamed, as gritted bread, as meal, as grits and mush, as pudding, as hominy.

  Once the trees is deadened, the woods will grow up something awful in briars and weeds. And sprouts come up around the stumps. All that powerful sap in the roots with nowhere to go will shoot up in rods and bust out in leaves. Ever notice how much bigger the poplar leaves on sprouts is than on trees? They’s so much sap in the roots and so little place to go. We spent the first summer chopping nettles and weeds, vines and poison oak. You let sunlight into the woods and everything will start coming out.

  Around laying-by time a wind storm come up and you seen what else happened to a deadening. The little limbs above begun to fall off among the corn. After a storm the ground would be littered with limbs that had died and broke. It was the second and third year when the big limbs started rotting and coming off, and the bark shucked off the trees and covered the dirt with pieces like shields on a battlefield. Eventually the trees theirselves rotted to the core and fell. The biggest oaks lasted maybe ten years on the trunk until they rotted, and by then we was turning the whole field, plowing around the standing stumps.

  It was that first summer I begun to think about what I called the mysteries of our place. Me and Realus worked like we was possessed. I cleaned that cabin and washed out the musty smell with lye. I scoured the base of the cabin and sprinkled lime around to keep the bugs and worms away, and to make the place smell sweeter. By June I knowed I was expecting Wallace, though I didn’t know he was a boy. But that didn’t stop me from working none. A pregnant woman feels at ease about things, unless she gets sick at her stomach.

  I made a broom out of a bundle of birch twigs and swept the yar
d down to the creek, and the trail back to the spring. We didn’t have no chickens then, so the yard wasn’t all that dirty. Realus promised he would get me some chickens as soon as he could, and some guineas too, to pottarack around the yard.

  Your Grandpa dug a little patch behind the cabin where I planted some beans and squash. And I sowed mint and parsley beside the door with seeds we had brought. And I planted peas and gourds too, and put sticks over the vines when they come up.

  I was bent over my bed of cabbage sprouts about a month after we deadened the trees when I heard your Grandpa’s ax stop. When he was working I got used to the sound and didn’t hardly notice it. They would be a “chop” and then the echo “it” coming back from the ridge across the creek: “Chop, it, chop, it.” My heart liked to have jumped into my throat, for I hadn’t heard no voices save my own and your Grandpa’s since we left the gold camp. I stood up, brushing the dirt off my hands and dress. I couldn’t see anything at the east end of the clearing where your Grandpa was cutting logs for a fence. He said the deer would eat up everything in the garden if we didn’t fence it.

  I walked around the corner of the cabin, where I could see past the sweetgum bushes, and there was Realus at the edge of the woods talking to a man and a woman. The man was leading this old gray horse and the woman was riding. It was one of those horses with mottled gray all over it, the kind I’d seen in Charlotte, and it looked strange there in the woods.

  I was almost shaking with excitement for I hadn’t seen nobody in such a long time. Or maybe I was afraid that we had been discovered there in the wilderness and our perfect life would be destroyed. I couldn’t make out what Realus was saying. I thought of running over there to welcome them myself, and then I thought, no, I’ll stand by my door and welcome them.

  And I was thinking, now I’ll have some other woman to talk to. And maybe they’ll have news of what’s going on in the rest of Watauga and the Holsten. I wanted to know who was our nearest neighbor, and how far it was to the river.

  Realus didn’t bring them to the house at first. They talked for several minutes and I was like to bust with curiosity. The voices echoed across the clearing. I started out to them, and then I seen your Grandpa was leading them toward the house.

  The woman had on a long gray coat that covered her dress. She looked like she had been rained on and then dried out in her clothes. I knowed how she felt. I reached up to shake her hand.

  “I’m Petal Jarvis, Richards,” I said. “Why don’t you all light and come in.”

  “They want to make the ford by nightfall,” Realus said, like it had already been discussed and decided they wasn’t stopping.

  “You all are welcome to stay for supper if you can eat what poor folks eat,” I said, sounding like my Mama.

  But your Grandpa frowned at me. “I was going to give them some meal,” he said. “It’ll be two months before they’s new corn.”

  He went into the cabin, and I said to the man, who was poor as a whippoorwill inside his dirty buckskin clothes, “You all must be tired of walking.”

  “We’ve come down the trail a fur piece,” he said. He seemed nervous and itching to be on his way. He kept watching the cabin door, waiting for your Grandpa to come out with the meal.

  “How far you going to?” I said.

  “Fur as we have to to find good land.”

  “They’s good land around here,” I said.

  Realus come back with the poke full of cornmeal and handed it to the man. They started across the clearing without so much as a thank you. We watched them skirt the deadened patch and disappear into the woods.

  “They wasn’t much polite,” I said. “They could have stayed here overnight.”

  “Just as well,” your Grandpa said. “They might steal from us or give us some kind of sickness.”

  “They looked tired,” I said. “How come they went on so quick?” My heart was still knocking from the surprise of seeing the strangers.

  “I told them we’d had smallpox here,” your Grandpa said. “I didn’t want them stopping.”

  “You never was afraid of nobody before,” I said.

  “They’re liable to rob us,” he said. “We’re alone here and you don’t know what kind of people they are.”

  “They’re people just like us,” I said.

  “We’ve got to think about the baby now,” your Grandpa said.

  The prospect of having a family makes some men worry. I was surprised he was suddenly so shy of strangers. It didn’t seem like him. But then he was going to be a daddy, and I guessed that had changed him. And maybe being alone in the woods with me had changed him too.

  “I wanted to talk to her,” I said. “She might have had news.”

  “Them people wouldn’t have no more news than we do,” Realus said. “Besides, I don’t want them telling people where we are.”

  When I went back to work in the seedbed, it hit me that what I wanted to tell somebody about was the baby coming. I wanted to talk to another woman and ask her advice. And tell her how I felt and find out what I was supposed to expect. Mostly I felt how much I wanted to tell my Mama the news.

  “Here’s something the woman give you,” Realus said, and pulled a vine from his pocket. It was a sprig of myrtle, what we call periwinkle. I don’t know where the woman had brought it from, but it was blooming, and I set it out over there under the hemlocks. You can see the periwinkle still blooming there in spring. Almost every old place in these woods has some around it.

  The first summer I worked right through fodder-pulling time and top-cutting time. We had to save every leaf of corn, for it was the only horse feed we had for winter except the corn itself. Didn’t have no oats or hay. Didn’t have no place to put the fodder till your Grandpa built a log shed. It was really two stalls, one for the horse, and one for the cow we might get. And over the stalls was this loft for the fodder. It was a big, tall, ugly-looking shed, but it served our purpose in them years. You could still see some logs of it over there for years. Realus didn’t have time to rive no shingles for it. So he put poplar bark on the roof. Later he nailed cedar shakes on it.

  I’d never done real field work before, except hoeing corn. But I sure learned quick. We hoed barefoot in that new ground under the deadened trees, which was foolish, given all the briars and weeds around the hills. Every day we seemed to kill another copperhead. But we had to save our shoes for winter. The awfullest weeds you ever seen growed up around the ringed trees. Big hogweed and queen-of-the-meadow twelve foot high.

  They was a black racer we named Zeb stayed around the corn patch. He was so black he glistened in the sun. We’d see him hanging on the limb of a tree waiting for birds, or slipping off into the woods. He liked to catch field mice, and your Grandpa sometimes teased him. Realus would stomp his feet at that snake, and Zeb would rare up and hiss at him. Blacksnakes will guard their territory. When he got mad you’d smell this stink that snakes let out when they’re riled. We’d laugh at him and the snake would look at us real mean, then slip off into the brush.

  Funny thing was, we didn’t see rattlesnakes. I thought I heard one singing off in the weeds one time, but it could have been a jarfly. Back then, in the woods, you could see lots of timber rattlers.

  I was getting heavy with Wallace along in late summer when we was pulling the fodder. It was the hottest time, and dusty. I had already been stung once by a packsaddle. They get in the corn leaves, and when I grabbed a handful to bind up I felt this pain like ten points of fire stick in my hand. My hand was swole for days. I was afraid the poison might get into the baby.

  We had almost finished with the foddering. The leaves was getting too dry to cure right. And I was trying to avoid another packsaddle. Realus had gone to carry a load to the shed loft. He had made this sled out of sourwood runners and poles which he used for everything. We didn’t have a wagon or nothing else.

  I was bending down to strip the bottom leaves off a stalk when I seen this thing I thought was a bundle of fodder. M
y eyes was full of sweat and I couldn’t see right. How could I have dropped a bundle without noticing, I thought? And then I seen the tail raise and buzz. There I was, bent over close, before I seen it was a rattler and the thing already coiled.

  I was a goner if it bit me close to the head. And the baby was a goner if it bit me anywhere at all. If I jumped back, it would strike, and if I stayed still, it might strike. The sweat was in my eyes so I couldn’t hardly see. But I had the sense not to look that snake in the eyes. It’s the Devil looking at you out of a snake’s eyes. It can put a spell on you and you can’t get away. A snake can charm a nursing woman and suck the milk out of her breasts and ain’t nothing she can do.

  But if a pregnant woman looks in a snake’s eyes, it will mark her baby. I’ve heard of a baby born with little snake eyes that has been marked, and babies born with scales on their backs, and born with no arms. I kept my eyes turned to the side and started backing away, one step easing back after another, hardly steps at all but little movements trying not to touch stalks or weeds. I never worked so hard on nothing in my life. I thought I could smell that old snake he was so close. He could have struck me anytime. He was big around as my leg, I guess. And his scales looked like they had hairs coming through them. Coiled up he would have filled a half-bushel basket.

  When I got about a yard back, I jumped far as I could. That snake struck at the same instant, and I bet he didn’t miss my leg an inch. A drop of venom hit my ankle and run like spit. A snake can strike his whole length, but he just missed me. I run and got the hoe and hit him before he slid away in the weeds. He was so tough I hit ten times before I chopped his head off. And then that big fat body laid there twitching and striking.

  “That thing will weigh twenty pounds,” Realus said when he come back and seen it.

  Now when my time was almost come I said to your Grandpa, “Is they a midwife near about?” I said it more than once. And he always said he’d go look for one when the time was right.