The Hinterlands: A Mountain Tale in Three Parts

by Robert Morgan

  “Let’s go in to the fire,” I said. “You must be awful hungry.”

  “I ain’t hungry,” he said.

  “You need to warm up anyway,” I said. I started leading him toward the house. He put his arm around my shoulders and we walked slowly toward the lighted doorway. He smelled of the damp and cold of the woods, like he had been out for weeks instead of days. Trail whimpered and run in front of us, and then behind us.

  When we got inside I was almost blinded by the firelight and candlelight.

  “Set down and I’ll warm up some cornbread,” I said.

  “Don’t bother,” he said. He seen Willa was asleep on the bed and kept his voice low.

  “No use to starve,” I said. “That won’t help nothing.”

  He bent to the fire and held out his hands. “I always meant to tell you,” he said. “I went looking for you and seen you had gone to the settlement.”

  I didn’t say a thing. I put the bread in a pan to warm it on the hearth.

  “You need a bath,” I said. “It will warm you up.”

  “I was afraid you would leave me,” he said.

  “At least you wasn’t here when the Indians come,” I said. I had the two kittles on boiling.

  “I stayed out in the woods with Dan and Trail. I must have rode a hundred and fifty miles.”

  “What happened to old Dan?” I said.

  “He’s over yonder by the edge of the field,” Realus said. “I thought about riding him further to the west, but I seen I couldn’t do that. I had to come back.”

  “You could be in Kentucky by now,” I said. I give him a plate of cornbread and grits and a piece of pie. Don’t ever believe a man when he says he’s not hungry.

  I got out the wooden tub and poured some hot water in it. From standing out there in the cold, he was chilled through to the joints. I knowed he’d be sick if I didn’t get him warmed up.

  “You’ve been cold and dirty long enough,” I said. “I want you to get in this bath.”

  Children, they was a pleasure in giving that big strapping man a bath. It was like bathing a great big baby, to make him fresh and clean. I guess in a way men are just babies; at least, they act like babies sometimes. In their shining white skin that don’t never see the sun they look tender as babies.

  That night, as we laid in bed with the firelight breathing in the room, I knowed I was right. Just touching him told me that. Sometimes you can see far ahead and way back at once. I seen that when I touched your Grandpa with love, it was like I was touching all the people back through the ages, through all their love and affection. And in the same way we touched the future through our love and our children’s down through the years. When you grandchildren, and your grandchildren, feel the closeness of a husband or a wife it will be like a part of me and your Grandpa living in you. Don’t worry if you don’t understand. I don’t think the young is meant to. I know I didn’t at your age. But I wanted to tell you anyway, so’s you’ll remember it after I’m long gone. Your Grandpa’s gone and he can’t tell you. He always had trouble speaking his affections anyway, though he could charm anybody in a friendly way.

  Next morning when I woke, Realus was not there. The bed was empty beside me, but soon as I set up I seen they was a fire strutting in the fireplace. It was just daylight, but the bed beside me was cold so your Grandpa had been gone for some time.

  I got up and dressed and put on water for tea and grits. I was glad to see the bathtub had been carried out. Willa woke up and stretched. “Is Pa coming home today?” she said.

  “Pa come home last night,” I said.

  “Where did he go?” she said.

  “He must have gone to milk,” I said. I looked out the door. They was a heavy frost, like the starlight had stayed on the grass, but no sign of your Grandpa. Even Trail was gone. I got the water boiling and made grits and tea. Just as Wallace and Lewis come down from the loft, I heard somebody in the yard. Your Grandpa opened the door. He held his gun in one hand and a limb of something in the other. The light was behind him and I couldn’t see what the branch was.

  “You was out early,” I said.

  “Pa, where you been?” Wallace said.

  “I went out to get my gun and to feed Dan, and to bring you this,” he said. When he closed the door, I seen it was a branch of witch hazel in full bloom. You know how witch hazel seems to blossom right out of the bark along the stems. The blooms was bright yellow.

  “Where did you find that?” I said. The limb seemed to fill up the room with its smell. Witch hazel has a sharp smell, a medicine smell, like it is supposed to wake you up.

  “I got it over on the branch,” he said. “It’s the last thing in the year that blooms. It blossoms when everything else has quit for the winter. Sometimes it throws its seeds on snow.”

  He started to hand me the limb, but I told him to put it on the table. I had to fix breakfast if we was going to have any. But as I worked, I thought how much I liked something that blooms after everything else has, something that shows they’s always another chance.

  “Put it in the jar of water there,” I said, “So they’ll be room for everybody at the table and it will keep blooming for a while.”

  II

  THE ROAD 1816

  I was always the kind of feller that had to be making something. Never could just sit with my hands empty. Even on a rainy day I had to be fooling around with a piece of wood or tightening up harness. I’d sit on the porch or in the corner by the fire scraping and polishing a piece of walnut for a gun stock or cherry wood for a lap desk.

  “Solomon’s the makingest youngun I’ve got,” my Mama would say.

  “It’s the spirit of the creator in him,” my Aunt Willa would say. “The maker puts his talent into some more than others.”

  I took pride in such talk. At least when I was just a youngun. But the truth was I made things because I couldn’t stop myself. I liked to be bragged on good as anybody, but mere love of praise would never drive anybody to work hard as I did.

  I’d see a piece of pine and have to get my hands on it. It was like the material told me what to do. The grain of the wood, the color and tone, even the smell demanded the block be shaped. It was like wood had its own idea about what it wanted to be.

  And once you get into a job, it’s like the job itself takes over. You know what I mean, son. The work pulls you along, pulls you into it. And next thing you know, it’s like you can’t make a wrong cut or measurement. The work takes you over and you just go with it.

  Must be why them fellers spend their lives making tables and chairs and such. Now I could feel to make chairs every day from the maple and ash and hickory the good Lord has provided. I could do it and be happy. But along when I was just about half-grown, I went on to other kinds of building. I done all the work here on the place Pa told me to. Just like you, I plowed and hoed corn in season, and pulled fodder and picked berries and cleared land in winter. I put my hand to nearly everything you could name, from syrup making to tanning hides. I smoked meat and hunted deer, and carried off taters and hams on my back down the mountain to peddle in Augusta.

  They wasn’t no road here back then, and you toted on your back or rode a horse wherever you went. Best people had was an old sled they pulled across the holler and along trails. Wasn’t no wagons or buggies ’cause they wasn’t no place to drive them, except way down in the valleys. And no place you could buy them, except down in Augusta. We was branch people, living here on the high creeks and headstreams.

  But it’s the hard work that pleases. The kind of work you dread until you start doing, like clearing up new ground or digging a ditch, or trying to figure out how to do something. The figuring may be the hardest of all, studying out a plan, getting the idea to make something. I’ve seen men break their backs with labor to avoid thinking about how they should do a job. Five minutes of study would have saved them days of sweat.

  But son, what I was going to tell you about was how I found another kind of buildi
ng. I had done some digging before. My Pa would give me a spade and say, “Dig out that tater hole,” or “Fill in the gully.” And once I helped dig Old Man Cephas Powell’s grave on the hill. And I found it was work I could put my hand to, carving the very flesh of earth. Every bit of ground is different in grain and color. Part of the pleasure is cutting into something new, something never before exposed to sun.

  One day when I must have been around fifteen, my Pa said, “Solomon, I want you to level out a path from the back yard to the spring.” You remember how steep the hill is back of the old place. In wet weather the spring hill got slick and Mama had to carry all her water up the trail on wash day. Pa was afraid she’d slip on the mud and break her leg.

  So I started digging. It was about a hundred fifty yards to the spring. You had to go past the woodpile and the washpot and through the steep woods. I had to cut out the brush to make a way for a decent path. The old trail just kind of wound through the trees and didn’t go with any plan. It had been there since the place was settled by my Grandpa, Realus.

  I’d seen surveyors work, running out a boundary with their rod and chain, and their sighting instruments. Land was being sold off by the speculators back then, and somebody was always running a line and hacking out a right-of-way. I seen I was going to have to figure where my path was going.

  The thing about surveying that was interesting was how they set everything to the compass. I didn’t have no dial, and I didn’t know exactly how it was done. But I knowed they set their compass to the North Pole and sometimes even to the North Star. That was a thrilling thing, to run a line through mud and brush and up a bank and across a ridge even, an unseen line that was set by degrees to something as far away as the North Pole, or a star. I wished I knowed how it was done, but I didn’t have no equipment, and nobody to teach me.

  When I scoped out the way to the spring I seen in my mind how the trail would go. But soon as I started chopping trees and grubbing up roots, I found how hard it would be to keep going where I wanted to. That was the first time I used an idea about building. I got a spool of red thread from Mama’s sewing box—didn’t ask her, just took it—and I strung it out through the trees where I wanted the path to go. First thing I learned was you had to line up everything by sight, and to do that you had to cut away brush and limbs to see to the curve in the hill.

  You never seen such chopping and grubbing as I did once that string was stretched around the slope. I measured out a zone six feet wide that I cleared, and once I pulled out the roots and dug up the stumps, I started leveling. Of course, I avoided all the stumps and big trees I could.

  That’s when I discovered the pleasure of hard work, son. I don’t mean just that intoxicated feeling when you work up a sweat and have the blood roaring in your ears, though that is one little part of what I am talking about. But I never believed in breaking my back just for the sake of doing it. No, I’m talking about the satisfaction of getting the hard job done right, of accomplishing something. That’s the deep-down pleasure of a man’s days. To see an idea take form in soil or wood or stone and know that hundreds of people will use your work down the years.

  As I was ready to level out the path, Pa come by and said, “Solomon, we don’t want no turnpike to the spring. A trail will do.”

  That made me so mad, I didn’t say nothing. Pa always had a way like that to hurt your feelings, just when you was proud of what you had done. He’d say something and just walk away like he hadn’t done nothing, didn’t mean nothing. That made me madder still. I thought of bashing him over the head with my shovel. That was the bad streak in me, always thinking of revenge. He knowed how to rile me, just as I was getting on with a job.

  I watched Pa walk away and thought of burying the shovel in his brain, for an instant, and then I spun back to work, and swung harder and dug deeper. That was the moment the work come to me so bright and clear. I seen what I could do, and what I was going to do. Because I was angry, and because I was guilty of bad thoughts, I seen everything shining and sharp. I seen my path swing out around the hill for the stream of feet. And I seen I would carve the earth for the use of the family, so not only Mama but generations would have the way to the spring.

  I cut into that hillside to level out the trail like I was eating the earth with the shovel. The humus under the leaves and roots weaving under the humus and the gritty clay underneath got shifted around by my hands. I felt like the shovel blade was an extension of my arms and every move I made hit its target, like I was finding gold. And I was finding the gold of use, of rightness. Every lick went true.

  But I want mostly to tell you about the gap road, and how me and your Grandma got together.

  For years they was talk about building a road into the mountains. The state of North Carolina did some surveys, and the state of South Carolina did some. People in Tennessee even promoted the idea of a road across the mountains for driving their stock to Augusta and Columbia. The old settlers of the coves wanted a way out to trade their produce and productions for cash money, and the Low Country people wanted a way into the cool mountains for summer vacations. Everybody that did a study concluded it was too expensive, even too dangerous. They knowed how it could be done, but without the business already to pay for construction, they was no way to finance such a project.

  Oh, we had our wagon tracks and cartways even then. Not in these hollers, but further down along the creeks and rivers. They was a kind of slip-and-slide trail down the mountain to Gap Creek, but it took four oxen to pull an empty wagon back up that way. Anybody carried something in, they packed it on horseback.

  After I built that trail to the spring and seen how wide and gentle it was, and how it eased the burden of carrying water back to the washpot, I commenced to study on the problem of a road up the mountain. I was a lad with ideas. I dreamed big dreams. I thought of myself like some boy in the Bible chosen to free his nation. These mountains bound us in, and I was going to split the ridge to let in the light of trade and travel. I didn’t know how I would do it. But I guaranteed to myself it would happen.

  Now the funny thing was how the vision of building the road become joined with romance in my mind. They got so tangled up I couldn’t think of one without the other. No sir, building the road was the same as winning Mary. Marrying your Grandma was the same as finding a roadway into the mountains. This is how it happened.

  I went to a funeral over at the meetinghouse in Cedar Mountain. It was not a service for any relative or close acquaintance. Those days we young folks went to every funeral around, not because we had so much reverence for the dead as because they wasn’t no better way to meet each other. A funeral brought together the community. They was something thrilling about the occasion. Preachers done their best preaching at funerals. And everybody was there. The dignity of the service was part of the pleasure. You got dressed up, and somebody was being consigned to eternity, honored by kith and kin. It didn’t matter if it was a deacon or a drunk, pillar of the community or blackguard. The girls wore their prettiest clothes, and everybody felt raised up a little out of the slowness of their lives.

  Me and my brother Charlie had walked up there. We lived about a mile below Cedar Mountain then. It was a Sunday in late summer. The cornfields we passed smelled sweet as milk and the corn was ripe for top cutting and fodder pulling. After the sermon in the little church we walked out to the graveyard. It wasn’t nothing but a little clearing with a few rocks and boards over the dozen graves. It had been warm in the meetinghouse and the open air felt good. And then I seen this girl walking with the family up to the grave. She was near tall as me and had this curly brown hair that shined in the sun. And she had red cheeks and brown eyes, like some Irish girls do.

  I was going to ask Mike Staton who that was, but the preacher had started praying and I took off my hat and bowed my head. Every time I glanced up during the long prayer I looked at her. And she didn’t have her eyes closed either. She was staring down at the grave like she was thinking of something
and not listening. The preacher prayed on and on, and virtually preached his sermon all over again as we stood there by the grave. The breeze fumbled with the ribbons and ruffles on her dress but she didn’t seem to notice. I seen she had a slim waist and graceful hips. For a tall slim girl she had a generous bosom.

  The prayer stretched on and on, and I was burning to ask Charlie and Mike who that was. I stood on one foot and then the other like a little boy. The instant the prayer stopped and they started throwing dirt on the grave Staton said, “You know they made a survey up through the gap?”

  “What gap?” I said.

  “Douthat’s Gap, the gap right here.”

  “Who made the survey?” I said.

  “Some company from Columbia and Augusta. They want to reach Asheville through Douthat’s Gap.”

  “They’ve made a lot of surveys,” I said.

  “But this time they run a line with chain and compass.”

  “Ain’t nobody going to build a road through Douthat’s Gap,” I said.

  The girl had moved away from the grave and walked back toward the meetinghouse. Her back was straight as a chair’s.

  “I’m going to do it,” I said.

  “You’re going to what?” Charlie said.

  “I’m going to marry that girl,” I said.

  “I thought you meant to build a road through the gap,” Staton said.

  “I mean to do that too.” And soon as I got home I told Mama I had seen the girl I was going to marry.

  “Who is she?” Mama said.

  “I don’t know yet, but I seen her today.”

  I asked around about the girl, and I found her name was Mary MacPherson, and her Daddy was a teacher at the college in town who had come over from Dublin, Ireland, when he was a young man. But he was from Scotland first. I always read every book I could get my hands on, but I never had any formal schooling except for a few weeks at our country school. A few weeks in winter, and a few weeks in summer before fodder-pulling time was all we had.