The Truest Pleasure

by Robert Morgan

  This is turning out to be the longest letter in the world. It’s been four days since I wrote the above, and I’m taking up my pencil at night, after the younguns are asleep.

  Sometimes I wonder if Tom don’t have his own black studies and confusions, and he just never talks about them, or even knows how to talk about them. I wonder if he don’t get just as tired and weak as anybody, but covers it up with hard steady work.

  But the thing I worry most about with Tom is what he really believes. Sometimes I don’t think he believes anything at all. I think he is trying to stuff all the wealth of the fields and weather into a bag of money. He is wringing the fat and sugar from the dirt the way a druggist gets the extract and essence from a leaf or root. But I know that’s not really so, for he loves the place itself too, and the work itself.

  Those we know best we know the least. They are so close we can’t see them. I feel married to a foreign being, and I don’t know what he means or wants. I don’t know what we have to tie us together. Sometimes I can’t remember why I married him.

  I wish I knowed how our people back in old times thought about religion. Did they believe as we do? Did they have churches at the beginning? Revivals are something recent in the mountains, since Pa come back from the War. But it’s hard to believe they did not have brush arbors back yonder. Maybe they worked too hard in those days clearing land to have time for the joy of meetings.

  I think about this because I wonder how steady over the long time our beliefs are. I feel part of something that goes on forever, but I can’t be sure it’s what others have felt.

  It worries me that others have not heard the gospel, that most people in the world have not heard the plan of salvation. But I can’t think as some preachers say, that everybody that’s not been baptized is going to hell whether they ever had a chance to know better or not. That would not make sense, that people would be lost that never had a chance to believe.

  But that brings me to another of my worries. If people in ignorance are not going to be lost, then what is the purpose of sending all these missionaries to convert them? Do you see my point? It can’t work both ways. Either they are not damned in their ignorance, or they are. So I can’t make sense of it. I’ve asked Pa and he can’t explain it. As you can see, Locke, I’m saying things I’ve never told to anybody.

  Locke, I envy you men, able to go where you want, to join the army and find an occupation, to travel and buy up a homestead in Arkansas or Texas if you want to and start all over. Maybe that’s my favorite dream, of going away and starting all over.

  But I don’t think I really want to go either. I don’t think I could leave here, or that there is another place I could be happy, much as I want to believe it. When I’ve gone to Greenville or to Asheville with Pa I ain’t seen any other place I’d like to live. I wouldn’t mind going for a few days, to that hotel in Asheville where honeymoon couples stay, where you can look all the way to Pisgah from your window. But it would be for just a few days, to get away from the kitchen and hot stove.

  One of the things I love about Tom is the way he is drawed to this land. That attracted me from the first, how he was attached to this place. We have felt the land was almost a burden. But through Tom’s eyes I saw what a beautiful piece of ground it is.

  Sometimes I feel such love of the place I just stand and look at the yard running down to the fields, and the fields down to the hazelnuts on the river. I stare at the trellis Tom made for roses and the sandbox he built for Jewel and Moody by the chimney and filled with river sand. Even the flowerbed that needs weeding seems intimate and perfect. The shed Joe made beside the crib for Pa’s wagon shines silver with weathering. I think the room I set in is like a pyramid, and has the power and focus of a crystal. It is my room and everything is located around it.

  When I look at the yard, even under the moonlight, I feel close to Great-grandpa Peace who cleared the place up long ago and set out arborvitaes and hemlocks, magnolias and junipers. And I see where Tom has trimmed the boxwoods and pruned the cherry tree by the chickenhouse. And I feel how people work together across time, just as sure as if we was all together. Even you, way out in the Pacific, doing your nursing, are working with us.

  It don’t bother me, Locke, that you talk about Darwin and Ingersoll and Emerson and other agnostics and infidels. I don’t worry about what you read and study about. What does worry me is that you are so far from home out of reach of our affection. I hate to think what being alone might make you think and feel. That is one reason I have been writing this long letter, to let you know you are not so alone way out in that army hospital on the other side of the world. You are right here in my thoughts just like you was setting on the sofa and telling funny stories.

  If you have any ideas that can help me, let me know.

  With love through Christ, your sister

  Ginny

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Somebody has been cutting timber on the ridge,” Tom said. It was early November and he had gone up to the summit orchard to pick the last apples before a freeze ruined them.

  “Where on the ridge?” I said.

  “Just beyond the orchard, out along the ridge and just under the ridge,” Tom said.

  “You mean on the other side of the summit,” Pa said. “Our line runs right along the top.”

  A sick feeling soaked through my back and down into my legs.

  “The timber is cut on this side of the ridge,” Tom said.

  “Surely not,” Pa said. “Do you know where the line is?”

  “I know where the top of the ridge is,” Tom said.

  “I should have showed you just where the line is,” Pa said.

  “Maybe somebody made a mistake,” I said.

  “Sounds like it,” Pa said.

  They agreed to go look first thing in the morning. As I put supper on I felt all hot and rushed. Pa didn’t say any more, but I could tell how bothered he was. There had been a boundary dispute with the Johnsons years before and it had come to a trial finally. Pa never liked to talk about it. The Johnsons owned the other side of the mountain, and they had quarreled with their neighbors on every side. Old man Thurman Johnson believed that somehow he had been cheated by surveyors and had never got the land called for in his deed, so every few years him and his sons would claim a few more feet on one side or the other. One of his sons had been killed years back when they disputed with the MacBanes about their western boundary. Nobody ever proved who did the killing. But it had been twenty years since the Johnsons had give anybody trouble over property lines.

  “You’d think people would respect boundaries that have been here so long,” I said. “The line is where it always was.”

  “What is a line?” Moody said.

  “It’s where our land ends and theirs begins,” I said.

  “Are you going to shoot them?” Jewel said to Tom. Recently she had tried to avoid talking to me.

  “Nobody’s going to shoot anybody,” I said. “We don’t even know what’s been done yet.”

  I’ve always cringed at talk of boundary feuds because they never really get settled. If somebody believes he don’t have all the land he should there is no way to persuade him otherwise. Even good Christian people get filled with hate. So the fussing and lawsuits go on and on. There was neighbors in the valley that hadn’t spoke for thirty years. They carried boundary quarrels into church work and politics. Their children got in fights at school. They took shots at each other out squirrel hunting, and stole timber off each other’s land. People otherwise accommodating, deacons and pillars of the church, dumped trash and run cattle on each other’s corn patches. Women had got in fights down at the store over a few feet of scrubland.

  I had always told myself I would never be involved in a boundary fight. It was too simple-minded. Better to give away a few feet of dirt than ruin your life feuding with a neighbor.

  “How much timber have they cut?” I said to Tom.

  “It’s hard to tell. I saw maybe twe
nty stumps, and the laps and sawdust where they had sawed up the logs.”

  “We have oaks on that ridge,” Pa said, “never been cut.”

  “They have now,” Jewel said.

  “Be quiet,” I said. “We don’t know that for sure.”

  But while Jewel and me cleaned up the table, and while I set by the fire reading, I couldn’t think of anything but the line on the mountain. I told myself to be calm, but anger rose in me like vapors off vinegar. I told myself to wait and see and not get riled before it was clear what had happened. The Christian thing was to give the benefit of the doubt, love your enemies. But my words didn’t have any effect on the anger growing in me.

  What could you do if somebody took part of your land? Even if it had been in your family a hundred years, it appeared they could just step across the line and take it. The Johnsons had give trouble to my grandpa, and great-grandpa. Surely there was a way to put a stop to their wickedness. They had the advantage that the mountain was so far from our house. It was almost an accident Tom had been up there to see where they cut the timber. My anger rose till I was astonished. I couldn’t have explained the fury that roared in me. I felt betrayed. My deepest privacy had been invaded. I was as mad as if my children had been harmed, or my trust took advantage of.

  “The Johnsons have done this one time too many,” I said to Pa.

  “Tom and me will go up and see what has been done,” Pa said.

  “We’ll all go,” I said.

  “No, Tom and me will go,” Pa said.

  That night I laid in bed thinking about the land on the mountain. I almost never went there except to pick apples. I wasn’t even sure myself where the line was. It run along the top, but a ridge is not as sharp as the comb of a roof. And I wasn’t sure I had ever seen where the corners was. Tom kept the road up to the orchard, and the field around the orchard, mowed. But there was woods up there he had never been in. Pa used to hunt squirrels on the mountain, and Joe had trapped foxes there. I knowed there was a holler with a spring at its head, and a cliff called Buzzard Rock further out the ridge. And there was another cliff called Hog Rock where hogs used to gather out of rain. It had been years since I had seen those places. We once climbed up there as children for a picnic on top of Buzzard Rock. There was a cave under the rock blackened by fires of hunters and maybe Indians. Joe found a tomahawk in the leaves below the rock.

  That night I dreamed I took Pa’s gun and climbed the mountain by myself. I found Thurman Johnson and his sons and daughters and daughters-in-law chopping trees, clearing the mountaintop.

  “In the name of Jesus stop,” I shouted.

  “We’re all working for Jesus,” Thurman said. “We’re building a church to keep out screamers and blasphemers.” Tobacco juice run from the corner of his grin. All his kin was looking at me. They had chopped down peach trees and apple trees too.

  I raised the gun at Thurman, but just as I pulled the trigger I woke up. My heart was racing and I trembled in the bed.

  The next morning Tom hitched the horse and wagon as soon as we had finished breakfast. I was glad Pa wasn’t going to walk to the top of the mountain. Tom brought the wagon around to the gate and Pa carried his shotgun and his musket out of the bedroom.

  “You won’t need those,” I said, remembering my awful dream.

  “You never know,” Pa said.

  “I don’t want you to get excited,” I said. “It won’t do your heart any good.”

  “I won’t,” Pa said. “We’ve got to see what has been done.”

  I walked out to the wagon with him, and Jewel and Moody and Muir followed me. “You all go back inside,” I said. They stopped on the porch. “You be careful,” I said to Tom.

  I watched them drive out of the yard toward the pasture gate.

  “Is Grandpa going to shoot Johnson?” Moody said.

  “Nobody is going to shoot anybody,” I said.

  Pa and Tom come back just before dinnertime. They looked tired, like they had been working all day. Pa had a gray look, the way people do after a heart attack or major disappointment. He climbed from the wagon and carried the guns into the house.

  “What happened?” I said. But Tom drove to the shed to unhitch.

  “Did Grandpa shoot them?” Moody said.

  “Be quiet,” I said.

  I put cornbread and beans and squirrel pie on the table, but I wasn’t hungry. Moody set down and I told Muir to quit picking his nose. Pa come out of his room and set down as Tom returned from the barn. Pa said grace and the children started eating.

  “Is nobody going to tell me what happened?” I said. I looked from Pa to Tom and back. “Has the cat got you-all’s tongue?”

  “He took up the stakes,” Tom said.

  “Who did, Johnson?”

  “He had pulled up the corner pins,” Pa said. “Every marker up there has disappeared.”

  “That’s illegal,” I said. “He can’t do that.” But even as I said it I had the awful insight that people will do anything they think they can get away with. And the bolder the act the more apt they are to get away with it. My bones felt rotten with dread.

  “How do you know it was Thurman?” I said, just for the sake of trying to sound reasonable.

  “We seen him,” Tom said.

  “He was up there?” I said.

  “Him and his boys was right there cutting timber,” Pa said.

  “And you didn’t run him off?” I said.

  “I said, ‘Thurman, what are you doing on my land?’” Pa said. “And he said, ‘Ben Peace, what are you doing on mine?’”

  “The lowdown scoundrel,” I said.

  “I said, ‘Thurman, you know we settled this line long ago.’”

  “‘No we didn’t,’ says he. ‘You’ve been using Johnson land for nigh a hundred years and I’m putting a stop to it.’”

  “And what did you do?” I said.

  “I said, ‘Thurman, you know the markers are where they’ve always been.’ ‘What markers?’ he says. ‘Can’t find no markers.’”

  When Thurman said that, Tom and Pa went looking for the corner pins, and they saw all the markers had been pulled up and hid.

  “What have you done with the stakes?” Pa said to Thurman.

  “I ain’t seen no stakes,” Thurman said. “But come next summer I’m going to harvest my apples and peaches on this ridge.”

  “That’s when I knowed I’d better get away,” Pa said. “I didn’t want to end my life killing somebody. Last man I shot at was a Yankee sharpshooter at Petersburg. Last thing I said to Thurman was, ‘I’ll see you in court.’”

  Both Pa and Tom looked defeated.

  “Mama, what is going to happen?” Jewel said, with tears in her eyes.

  “Nothing is going to happen,” I said, “except Thurman is going to be taught a lesson.”

  “Thurman has been coveting our land all his life,” Pa said. “And he figures this is his last chance to get it.”

  “Well, he will die disappointed,” I said.

  “What are you going to do, Mama?” Moody said.

  “I’m going to swear out a warrant for trespass,” I said.

  “He is depending on us doing that,” Pa said.

  “He is depending on us not doing that,” I said. “He thinks we won’t take the trouble.”

  “It won’t do any good,” Pa said. “The court will appoint a surveyor, and Johnson will hire a lawyer to bribe the surveyor or he will lie to the surveyor about the corners.”

  “Do you have a better idea?” I said. Neither Tom nor Pa answered. “Then we’ll go to town tomorrow,” I said.

  Word of the dispute traveled fast. Florrie come that afternoon and said David had heard it at the store. She said Thurman bragged that he had run Tom and Pa off his property.

  “The Johnsons have always been trash,” Florrie said. “During the Confederate War they was just outlaws and thieves robbing from widows and children.”

  “The Devil protects his own,” I said.<
br />
  “Everybody lets a skunk have its way,” Florrie said.

  Tom’s silence worried me. I was angry and I knowed Pa was terrible upset. But Tom didn’t say anything all through supper that night. And later while we set by the fire he just stared into the flames. He set like he was studying on something. I knowed how much the land meant to him, and his silence scared me.

  “Now don’t you even think of doing anything,” I said as we was going to bed.

  “Somebody’s got to do something,” he said.

  “I’ll do something,” I said. “I’m going to see the lawyer.”

  “A lawyer won’t help,” he said.

  “A court order will help,” I said. “A court order will put some fear into Thurman.”

  “These cases get dragged on for years. Only ones to profit are lawyers. People lose their places just to pay the fees.”

  He was right about that. But it didn’t do any good to study on it. The time for settling disputes with guns and fistfights was over. Both Pa and Thurman was old men. Maybe Thurman didn’t care if he got shot. I had heard he was ailing, getting feeble. That made it all the more surprising he had chose this time to claim our land. That night I kept thinking about what I’d say to Lawyer Gibbs. I rehearsed the facts and the story of the dispute with the Johnsons. I decided removal of the boundary markers was the most important point, more than cutting of the timber. Johnson could claim the line was further down the mountain, but there was no excuse for disturbing the corner pins without a court order. The destruction of the markers had to be the center of my case.

  The following day was cold and overcast. In the early gray November morning Tom drove Pa and me to the depot.

  “Can’t I come?” Jewel said. “I want to go to the cloth store.”

  “You have to stay with the younguns,” I said.

  “I want to come,” Moody said.

  “Me too,” Muir said.

  “I’ll bring you a poke of candy,” I called back to them.

  It had been a year since I had gone to town. I shivered with excitement and fear. I had put twenty dollars in my purse to pay the lawyer and get something for the children. I took another ten from my jewelry box. I hated to go to town for it made me feel dizzy and lost to be among so many people.