The Pritchett Century

by V. S. Pritchett

  A MOUNTAIN SHERIFF

  Broken in to the mountains now, we assaulted new heights, took unknown trails and saw with little wonder the mounting contours and abrupt dropping of the ridges. The leaves of the rhododendrons were long, dew-weighted arcs. The massed and intricate undergrowth of the woods drooped with condensing vapors. Infinitesimal spheres of water lay in dim rind over bark and foliage. Early forms of mist floated like curled leaves in the pools of morning in the valleys.

  Clouds were low like motionless surf, poised forever without falling. There were the wet odors of fallen and decaying leaves, of new-cut timber, of sodden fibrous soil, the green dankness of the woods, the rude smell of bruised leaves and of moss-grown tree wreckage, the tang of broken ramage of fir, balsam, spruce, of chestnut, hickory, walnut, oak and maple. The morning vapors sucked strong flavors from the earth, and the tepid gray of coming rain seemed to draw out of the mountain floor a bitter, green exhalation of sap.

  We climbed over miles of mist-choked woodland, passing no one except an occasional black-hatted mountaineer with his gun, swinging out of the laurel and jumping onto the track, hiding his suspicions with a parrying “Howdy.” Clay and ocher leaves were matted on the boots of these men, and moss stains were on their overalls, and their black hats were faded to lichen and verdigris.

  Violet smoke spiraled cannily heavenward from dingles where women were boiling water and washing clothes near the springs. They boiled the clothes in huge brass caldrons. The greeting was always the smiling, “Howdy,” masking a quick scrutiny. But the polite hospitality always shone through: “If you-uns is tired, get ye chairs up at t’house and rest up a spell, an’ take some apples. The spring done dried up so I hauled the clothes down to thisa one and lit me a fire here to save fetchin’ water to bile. Has thar bin no rain whaur you-uns come fro’? Wall they claim hit’s the same in all the world.”

  The shacks were one- or two-roomed, with a bending porch and a barn, the timber charred and flaked with age, like warped black wafers. Trays of sliced apples would be drying on the roofs, strings of peppers hanging in the windows, and a drying sheepskin in the barn. Lines of rain were traveling down the creek toward us, a dense warp taut from the looms of cloud. Scarlet birds pitched out of the laurel with the tumbling flights of bats.

  “Hit’s clar over Cloudland,” said a youth, gathering apples. “But them weather birds means rain.”

  Crossing the stepping-stones of a river we met in midstream an oldish man carrying a bag. He was gentler than the usual mountaineer. He wore a frayed but neat black suit, and a newish black hat with a crown unsullied by defiant bulge or hollow. He wore no collar. His eyes were pale as watery sunlight and the lineaments of his face were penciled with a natural irony and obstinacy. He spoke in reedy falsetto. He twinkled half gayly, half superciliously before us and said:

  “Howdy. Pretty day! Yessir! What’s your name? Where do you all come from? Waal. That your wife? Where are ye going? My name’s Sam Robinson. I am a preacher. I go everywhere. I belong to no one. No one belongs to me. I belong to myself. Kinda strange to think of a man not belonging to himself! Mighty glad to know ye and if you’re over the Tennessee side ye’ll find my folk on the hills. They’ve got farms, and cows and hogs and sheep. Sam Robinson, and remember I don’t belong to no one.”

  Leaving it at that he left us abruptly, jumped to the next stone in the river and turned up the mountain; and the woof of haze rising in the rain’s warp wove him into the gray-green blur of wet.

  We entered the trees again and still climbing, we heard the rain clattering on the roof of the forest and leaking in crackling channels and spouts. We went for miles up the green forest caverns, and the close, spindling tree trunks, distancing to a blur of silver, seemed to pour like cold and noiseless torrents from the sky. Gashry Alison must have taken that trail a score of times, we imagined, silently trudging, absorbing from the still air of the solitary acres of woodland, new currents of eloquence.

  At a break in the trail we hit a creek and there was a high barnlike store there propped up high on a platform. Posters of sales, wanted men, and advertisements were pasted on the planks, and were tearing limply from them. The storekeeper was sitting at the door reading a large Bible. His gun stood beside him. It turned out he was the sheriff, and from his conversation and girth we perceived he played a gigantic part in the scattered community of ten farms and a white church tiptoed on a knoll.

  A yellow beard, like a corn shuck, spouted from the sheriff’s chin. His voice had the nasal pitch of the village dialectician. He denounced Darwin partly as a nincompoop, partly as an ill-equipped emissary from Avernus. He told us of the theological disputes of the creek, the public debates about the Scriptures, in which he had downed many an opponent amid the applause of one side and the groans of the other.

  “The last time waur wan I defended ol’ Sam Robinson. Does you-uns know him? Waal, he hain’t no debater and waur kinda ’fused like by a feller from Roarin’ Creek. He allowed he waur a right smart feller, but he looked a purty mean sort o’ popskull wan I’d finished. ‘I suspicioned hit all ’long,’ I said opening the Bible. ‘Ye can’t ’scape Holy Writ. Ye hain’t even got your tex’ c’rrect!’ ”

  For days afterward I confess I was merely amused by this muscular Christian, who the next moment was describing how he had repulsed a “shootin’ up fray” from over the state line, roped his prisoners to chairs, and read the New Testament to them. But a mountaineer took me to task and showed me that men like the sheriff had done a lot, after their fashion, to destroy much of the superstition and emotionalism to be found in the creeks.

  “Sky’s gettin’ clar,” said the sheriff as we walked to the door. I asked if he had ever heard of Gashry Alison, the peddler.

  “Why, reckon I did. He used to come in here, peddlin’ things—clothes, spectacles, brooches. He tol’ me he was born in Jerusalem. That’s in Turkey. Waal, pretty smart o’ peddlers and sich comes thisa way. But thar hain’t one like ol’ Gash Alison. He’s bin sportin’ ’roun’ the whole of Americky on foot. He’s a quare man. He’s got a quare furrin name too. He tol’ me, ‘I’m the only Gash in the world. My mother said wan I was born—’ ”

  A horseman jumping down at the door looked in, up, about and around, and stopped when he saw us. He then picked up a sack of flour and laid it, behind the saddle. Mounting, he leaned over and smiled at the sheriff, and called:

  “Doc says the apples is all picked and the firs’ waggon is way up on the yan side o’ Ripshin Ridge.”

  “Jinks,” exclaimed the sheriff. “Must be plumb on the Pike.”

  And locking up the store, he walked off lankily with his gun and his Bible.

  WHAT THE VOICE SAID

  He looked at us tolerantly. He turned and pointed up the creek, saying: “I disremember ’xackly, but mebbe hit’s ten miles an’ terrible rough. Does you-uns ’spectation to get to the top? Waal, it sure is a wunnerful place. They say ye can see—”

  “It’s burning. Keep a-stirrin’ it,” threw in his wife, a dry, cane-colored woman, crisp and lined like a corn shuck. His little rapture fell like a cut stalk. He turned to the steam and the smoke and went on stirring the apple butter in the huge black caldron. He was stirring with a heavy wooden pole six feet long.

  The caldron was standing on a stick fire in the field, and at a distance from the heat of it his barefooted wife and his barefooted daughters were slicing apples and throwing them into the caldron. The eyes of this family seen through the keen haze of cobalt smoke had a wildness in them. This might have been the witch scene in Macbeth.

  “Hit’s awful mean stirrin’, stirrin’—” apologized the man.

  The range we were to cross against his advice was nearly seven thousand feet high. It was forest-covered from base to summit, and a rocky trail, once used by ox wagons in fetching lumber but now altogether disused, tackled the slope abruptly and looped the contours.

  When the trail reached the high gap it fizzled out into a wide
“bald,” a bare dome of mountain where the gales had cleared away the trees and cropped the turf almost to the roots. The skeleton gray stumps of cut or uprooted trees stared oddly, vacantly, like forgotten milestones. The earth was windstripped and seemed to be lighted only by the gaze of the fog as it moved over.

  It is simple thus in a few lines to indicate hours of struggle, for comparatively low as the range was, it takes large effort to haul oneself up such slopes. The filtering underworld gloom of the forest is something to fight through. After plodding and hard breathing without any apparent gain, we would see through a gap in the trees that already we were head and shoulders out of the lower valley ocean where the choppy hillocks swirled minutely and crumbled into green surf.

  Then we would turn and dive again into the submarine forest verdure and feel its fluid air. The spindling gray trunks of millions of trees packed like threads of water into a blurred torrent of distance, poured and splashed down in immense silence about us. We had the sensation of walking in flooded vaults of touchless sap-distilled water.

  The earth drew the noise out of our feet as we strode from silence to silence, while the multitudinous forest waited. In cities silence is negative, is the absence of sound. But on that vast shield of mountain forest the silence was positive. One felt its presence, breathed it in tangible, inaudible drafts.

  At times we felt there was no air; only this greenish, glassy quiet in which the falling of the crisp body of a leaf hit distinctly, deliberately, with the ring of event.

  For hours we pushed, pushed, pushed back the air, pressed back the trees, stamped the earth, toed the rocks, shouldered all our forces to the ascent. After the first ridge I vowed I would never climb a mountain again. But which is worse, to climb a mountain or to be in a valley wanting to climb one?

  The thought of Gashry Alison comforted me. It was the constant mention of him among the mountaineers, and the spur which the unknown gives to the imagination, that made this lonely and unknown figure a companion. His pack must have been heavier than mine, what with his clothes, spectacles and peddling staff.

  How did he find the ascent? Did this quiet solidify against him? Seize him like deep pervading water? Or did his warm nature melt and release the mountain forces, till leaves fell from the trees like the crash of cymbals, and springs sang out, and partridges rattled up from cover like country people cluttering out of church, and till winds mounted and swelled a manifold diapason through the forest’s mighty register of pipes?

  How was it with Alison? Did he sing? Did he muse? Did he tire? Did he rush his hills? Or did he sink back into his own pace and lug his body up glumly, while the forest, always ahead and standing in thin, silver battalions, ordered him up and up, in its inescapable routine?

  Perhaps traveling is a mundane thing. All our giants are windmills, all our armies are sheep, if we go forth with the rhetorical expectations of Don Quixote. Gashry Alison must have had something the Spanish gentleman missed.

  It takes more than a pair of legs to make a man climb mountains and live on salt bacon and pastry among strangers in order to peddle brooches, clothes and spectacles. I believe all Alison’s windmills must have been giants.

  There was always some news of Alison to be got at a mountaineer’s hut. Sitting on the porch while leading the lanky, genial but suspicious “Doc” or “Pete” onto the subject, one would eventually hear something like this:

  “Thar hain’t no one the like o’ Gash Alison. He’s the travelin’est man I ever seed. Seemed like as though he waur always footin’ it over the worl’. ‘Wan will I build me a house an’ settle?’ he says, the last night he waur here. ‘Boys,’ he says, ‘I fit in three wars and seen a sight o’ frays and places, and guess I’ll jes be shacklin’ ’round till I’m as ol’ as you-uns is, grandf’er.’ ”

  Before dusk we reached the “bald” and were as high as we ever climbed in our wanderings. Over the gale-cropped dome of the “bald,” the gritty gray clouds passed low like enormous buzzards. Scarves of cloud moved down from the banks, and looking below them as through a half-covered window, we could see the sun-honeycombed forest cast distantly away into the ultimate hollows of the world.

  The clouds rolled like a surge over the spruce and balsam, smudging the indigo masses with fog. But westward we could see the tidal summits of an ocean of hills; varying, pellucid ranges over which passed squalls of green, ultramarine and gray. The long fields swept up obliquely to where the summits broke or rolled over, throwing up calls of spray to the inaccessible sky.

  This was crisis. Alison must have stood where we were standing, many a time, a wind-dark speck pausing on the dome of the “bald.” Now I should find him, hear all about him. Or this would be the end.

  But life and mountains do not have our dramatic sense. I heard of Alison again that night and again the day following, when, like a falling star, his golden course burned suddenly out halfway up in the heavens, unfinished. But this night we slept in a shack in the upper branch. The grandfather, father, mother, daughter and son of the house slept in one room and we in the other. The mountaineers will give anything up for a stranger, do anything for them. In fact, the conversation turned that way as we sat before the fire.

  “We-uns niver turns away no one wan they asks for shelter an’ a meal’s victuals. Thar’s always someone comin’ through the gap, peddlers and sich. Gash Alison uster come reg’lar.”

  The father broke in with high-up voice:

  “Does you-uns know Gash Alison? Waal, he were a furriner and him comin’ over the waters. He ’llows he’s the only Gash in the worl’. He says the day he waur born his mother didn’t know how to call him till one night, like it would be ol’ man Alison had a dream, and a v’ice said, plumb loud, so hit woke him, ‘Gashry!!’ That’s a right quare name. ‘How d’ye spell it?’ I asks. ‘I couldn’t rightly denote,’ says Gash. ‘Like the v’ice kinda didn’t say nathong more’n that.’ ”

  THE WOMAN WHO SMILED

  I sat on the porch of the shack of the woman who smiled.

  Everyone on the creek was related to everyone else. There had been intensive intermarriage for generations. The wit who said a man might be his own grandmother and not know it, erred more in lack of tact than he erred in exaggeration. The Ayreses, the Ingrams and the Vances brooded in their lofty hollows far from call of man or beast from the plains.

  The blue smoke of the caldrons scratched the air, the bare, damp feet of the women and children were marked by the basket patterning of the field grass. These earth-held families raised corn, sliced apples, made honey, shot in the woods, and brought sacks of flour on horseback to their shacks.

  The Ayreses, the Ingrams and the Vances brooded and fattened turkeys, and nothing ever happened except a great gale or a spell of drought. The boys tried the settlement school for a while, grew up and felt their legs getting too long for them, took guns and went up into the woods alone to live, till inclement weather or weariness of excitement drove them down to the creek again.

  The wind is clever, the rain is sharp, and earth clings to boots and body; and something of the wind, the rain and the clay, something careless, dynamic, stolid, entered the ways of these boys, these Ulstermen, these Scotsmen, these English whom the mountains held.

  These boys had never seen the sea, or cities, or Negroes. One of them told me he first saw a Negro when he was eighteen, and that he ran home frightened, shouting, “I’ve seen the boogeyman!” Horace Kephart, in his book on the mountains, tells almost the same tale.

  Skies are fair today, but tomorrow gray gullies of water may spurt down, or winds hiss arrowing through the air. So one night Ed Ingram—I naturally never give the real names of these mountaineers—who was eighteen, ran off with Rose Vance, who was fourteen. It was not exactly an elopement because nearly everyone knew about it.

  The couple ran over into Tennessee, where the marriage laws are easier; and the magistrate in one of the creeks married them. The ceremony was brief. Mountain ceremonies always are brief
. A tale is current that one magistrate boasted his marriage ceremony to be only four words: “Stand up. Jine. Hitched.” I understand it is longer nowadays.

  At news of the elopement the parents were scandalized, having done exactly the same themselves; then resigned; then relieved. As old McCoy Vance said, “Wan a woman takes an idee into her head hit hain’t no good obstructioning. I’ve got twelve daughters and seven sons, an’ I know summat about it.”

  Ed Ingram worked a bit, loafed a bit and went for days and days on end shooting in the woods. He could never resist the cool, lengthy woods, free and clear to him as spring water. He didn’t harm anyone. He didn’t interfere with anyone. The mountains are wide as the wind. Why should anyone want to interfere with him? Isn’t there room enough and to spare for all in the mountains?

  It is good enough to enjoy one’s own happiness. It is bad enough to suffer one’s own wretchedness. What business is it all of strangers, of educators, officers, of the monotonous, organized people of the plains, where the water is so poor and warm with lying in lead pipes that the townspeople have to put ice in it! Fancy putting ice in water!

  Rose Ingram may have five, ten, fifteen children by now. Besides there are turkeys to fatten, fruit to preserve, food to cook, and that man to wait on hand and foot; and water to carry from the springs, and clothes to mend, taxes to pay, and apples to sell.

  Once in a while she washes clothes, not often, though; and complains of the clouds of flies that fill her bedroom-cum-kitchen-cum-parlor. If she and Ed were to read this they would probably resent the implication of poverty, for a mountaineer will admit himself to be everything except poor.

  “Wan has you-uns ever lacked a meal’s victuals or a bed in the mountains?” I can hear them asking. But it is not that kind of poverty. If hospitality is riches, then the mountaineers are the richest people in the world. I remember the rebuke I received from a man whom I had offered to pay for a service: