“Pore folks haster work. But we don’t hafter work. We hain’t pore.”
All this I thought while sitting on the porch of the hut of the woman who smiled. Gray parallelograms of rain shadowed the creek, and soaking scarves of white cloud surf flew from the wet blue and madder mountains. The water haze was over the creek, a web of flat vapor. The sky was hoofed and rutted with botched cloud traveling and thrown up in heavy clods.
Runnels of bright clay water were richly pouring with the note of clear cattle bells, and a stocky rain tapped like drumsticks on the roof of the hut. Escaping from the collapse of rain, we rushed to the porch of the woman’s house. It was little more than a shed propped up high on four piles of rock.
A semicircle of beehives made of pipes and tin cans with rocks for lids stood in the clearing before the house. A lambskin was stretched over the wall to dry.
The woman was sitting on the floor in the doorway of the hut. She was scantily clothed in a coarse dress, and her legs and feet were bare. Her straw-colored hair was drawn from her forehead and fell in limp tails down her back. Ten ragged and contented children were crawling over her as she nursed a young baby, and sat curled on the floor like a gentle animal, uncomplainingly.
She was as pale as water, pale as sap, pale as a cane of rye, and her faint, narrow eyes shone with an idling light. She looked at us dreamily; and her lips, weirdly thin and colorless (from wind and rain and not from poverty, we felt), construed a little changeless smile. It was always there. She seemed to look at us and smile at us through water from another world. It was the smile of Mona Lisa.
Questions dawdled from between her lifted lips:
“Whar does you-uns come from? What did you-uns say you-uns was called? Is you-all man and wife? Uh, huh. How old are ye? An’ you-uns comes over the waters? That’d be a scandalous long ways, yander, I reckon. Would you-all like some apples? If you-uns wants any, jes get ye them. Thar’s more apples this y’ar nor any y’ar I ever seed.”
This reads absurdly, for every sentence loafed between linked pauses in that drooping intonation which is of the soil. She said she had been married when she was fifteen and was now twenty-nine. She said she had eight children, and had three sisters younger than her own eldest daughter. She herself had been one of a family of twenty-one.
She smiled continuously her faint pearl smile.
“Las’ night the moon was travelin’ north,” she said. “Hit’ll rain a right smart piece more and get cold. I mind the time wan our spring friz plumb up on the first of September.”
I laughed at this and she looked at the feathering rain. And her lips lifted and her constant smiles moved lightly like a single ripple of water.
A break in the thicket showed two men coming to the house. Lanky figures with hands in pockets, and a gun apiece laid horizontally between their arms behind their backs. They stopped when they saw us, then jumped onto the porch and smiled a doubtful “Howdy” and scanned the dimly greeting lips of the woman for information about us.
They went inside the house and studied us from behind the curtains, evidently very suspicious. “I know whar ye’ve bin, daddy,” cried out one of the children, but the father came out genially and clapped his hand over the child’s mouth. He introduced himself: “I’m Tom McKinney, yours truly. I didn’t catch yourn?”
He went inside and fell to whispering with his companion. A lot of mysterious operations went on inside the room. We noticed signaling with fingers, chins and lips. Turning sharply, I caught the woman scrutinizing us closely with awakened clear eyes, but when she saw me turn they fell back subtly to the underwater idling gaze.
The man walked up and down impatiently inside the house, and, muttering, stepped to the window to peer at us. We were obviously not wanted, and they were all greatly relieved when we rose to go, although they pressed us politely to stay. I remember seeing the lifted lips of the woman. A pale, queer smile has been dawdling after me ever since.
IN THE SMOKIES
It was the last house in the creek, and we stayed the night there. Beyond was a heaped wall of enmeshing forest, and mountains, retreating ridge by ridge and outflanking valley by valley into Tennessee: virgin forest, pathless, uninhabited except by shy bears and other wild animals. The last house, after that nothing, smudges of dull green, cold, dark.
The house was a half-roofless shack hidden by a palisade of tall corn. There were two bedrooms with sacks nailed over the windows for lack of glass. And a kitchen with only three walls, the fourth being the forest. Another room and the kitchen were roofless.
It was vague blue dark when we asked for shelter, but the tall shrill woman of the house took us in pleasantly enough, but in an impersonal way as though we entered by the right of nature, like the wind and the rain.
She intoned her welcome in a voice that was neither melancholy nor joyful, but like a bodyless voice, a thing soughing from the trees or talking over the soil.
We groped in by the yellow light of the lamp, sat, and so fixed our shadows on the walls; and talked with the family. There were a man, the woman, her daughter and her son, and an older woman who must have been the boy’s grandmother.
They asked us the usual questions. They had always lived in the mountains until two years before when they migrated to South Carolina to work in the cotton mills. But owing to the changes in trade the family had returned to the mountains, and were now ten miles away from the nearest store, five miles away from a wagon road, with two rivers to ford and steep land, steep as clouds, to till. Well may they speak of a man falling out of his field.
As we talked, bats flew into the room and dodged around. Bars of heavy blue night lay solidly between the rafters. All we could get to eat was cold pastry and molasses; but the white stars, like drooping small wells of white water, hung closely above us. There was not a flake of moon.
The shrill woman lamented her inhospitality: “I hain’t handy at all with me stove all tore up from jolting in the wagon.”
Conversation dropped, and there were stark silences. There were glances, and the grandmother said, “I’m a going to bed now,” and climbed into bed with all her clothes on. The girl shouted to her brother, “Get ye to your pallet.”
We sorted ourselves out. The father slept in our room in the other bed, snored all night and talked to himself, while the wind blew at the sacking nailed over the window, and the crickets scissored their monody of high notes.
Early in the morning, while it was still empty and dark and all sound but the creeping of water in the stream had stopped, the man got out of bed and tapped on the wall. He was answered, and later met his wife in the kitchen where they began to prepare breakfast. It seemed to us it could hardly be much past midnight, and we dragged ourselves dismally to a meal of hot pastry, salt bacon, blackberries and buttermilk; with the shrill woman urging, arguing and persuading all the time. She said it was six o’clock.
Came a thump and scuffling from the other room and in ran the grandmother shouting, “Does you-uns know what the time is? Waal, hit’s three o’clock!” Protests were in vain. It was only three o’clock. I had felt it in my bones. It turned out the man had only guessed the time when he knocked on the wall, and that his wife had looked at her clock without lighting a match, and had thought it was half past five!
We all stood there, gray and vacant forms, with a yellow film of lamplight cast limply without enthusiasm upon us. At last when the shrill debate had ended the woman said, “Waal, reckon I’ll hafter make an extry meal today to make up. And you-uns will be able to get the bursted chestnuts before the squirr’ls gets them.”
But we went back to bed.
The man set off on foot—he had no horse—down the creek on his ten-mile journey to the nearest store, to bring back a sack of flour.
Later that morning we discovered where the woman had bought her molasses of the night before. A man was standing in a field supervising the crushing of rye cane between two revolving rollers set in a frame to which was attached a pol
e ten feet long. A mule was harnessed to the pole and as he walked round and round, the rollers turned, the cane was crushed and the syrup oozed down a gully pipe and was strained through sacking into a tub.
“Today’s ’ll be a right smart piece cl’arer than what you-uns had las’ night,” said the man.
His son, a sinewy fellow, was chopping at a stump of tree: “I’m hewin’ me a block for my corn mill,” he said. He had already built a large wooden wheel, and a race propped high in the air on stilts. All the grinding in the mountains is done by these old watermills and the corn is crushed between two enormous millstones.
After miles and miles of climbing we prepared to assault one of the flanking ridges and so descend into a far creek, where there was a lumber camp. The distance was varyingly given as between two and ten miles. It turned out to be over fifteen miles, and the hardest fifteen, the roughest and the steepest, I have ever done. Eight miles of it was done in heavy rain and cloud. We took a mountain youth to guide us to the top of the ridge.
He was as silent and as expressionless as a leaf. He had carved blue eyes. He strode easily where we struggled. And the more I tried to get conversation out of him, the more laconic and defensive he became, replying “Uh huh” to nearly everything I said. We went on something like this:
“Hot,” I said, feeling very blown.
“Warm,” he replied.
“You’re used to it”—from me.
“Uh huh.”
“Do you often go this way?”
“Uh huh.”
“Is it far?”
“Uh huh.”
“Have you always lived in that creek?”
“Uh huh.”
The only time he became eloquent was when we passed a deserted farm lying in a boulder-strewn clearing in the mountain forest.
“Beaumont Starr’s farm,” he drawled. “He left las’ spring. Hit was too hard. Siles gone old and wore out, an’ nothin’ ’ll grow in that thar.”
Tremendous chestnut trees shot like isolated gray columns out of the green ruin of thickets. Beaumont Starr had lived there with his brother, and their ancestors before them, tilling granite.
We climbed for three hours through steep woods of pine, balsam, chestnut and hickory; of bellwood, maple, walnut and oak—a struggle in green monotone. On the summit, which seemed unattainable, we finally flung ourselves down on the hard earth utterly exhausted; with a faint ocean of blue ranges palely washing and lapping in noiseless surge and foam of cloud-capped summits, below us.
The air was still. Not a sound. Not even the motion of one leaf touching another. It seemed that the world had stopped: that we lay supine at a point beyond all sound and effort, that we lay closely beneath the flawless and level ceiling of the world.
We saw sturdy and extraordinary foreshortened clouds and ethereal territories of mountains, range after range, merging into a haze of moth silver. The mountains were strips of water modeled by the air. Ranks of solidifying ether. Anything but mountains. Anything.
From our “Necket” we could see our ridge slung like a firm hammock of green from knob to knob, a blue-green causeway crossing the water of sky, or broad and churned with green and choppy light like the wake of a steamer. Distantly was Clingman’s Dome, with the other gray hosts, while a wide surf cloud lay fixedly, mazedly upon them. From their highest elevation bannered a stilly chrome wash of startled light.
We descended alone. Rain collapsed on the roof of the trees and spouted through. We shattered the forest silence as a rod splits emerald ice. We hurtled down, deeper at every jump, into the high and bare cold cavern of frigid trees. A shot suddenly was fired somewhere before us and below, and its staccato echoes ricocheted on the polished walls of green. Were we at last mistaken for revenue officers as had been prophesied? But life lacks our sense of the dramatic. We soon came upon three hunters standing in a ditch and they smiled ironically at our little excitement.
When at last we came out under the open sky it was torn into rags of mist and vapors which drifted, a soaking tatterdemalion, across the knobs and creeks; and entering a valley, whose form was quite smudged out by rain and night, we splashed through sodden miles of clay, eight miles to the lumber camp, and found bed there.
SITTING IN A MOUNTAIN TOWN
In the morning I crossed the river and walked into the town. It had a railway station, four churches, a bank, a main street, two side turnings and no “movie,” among other things, for the distraction of its eight hundred or more inhabitants.
An automobile road looping through the mountains from the center of North Carolina was just nearing completion, and during the day one might occasionally see gangs of colored men throbbing by on trucks to the excavations and quarries, and an odd white-bearded mountaineer of the old school riding horseback and sidling and prancing about as though he were conducting a daring military operation.
The main street of the town was shaded by an avenue of maples, and poplars with dull green and silver leaves. The wide almost motionless river was rust yellow and cloudy dense with clay flood water, on which lay the heavy cobalt and sepia shadows of trees.
In the street the sunlight opened in grotesque and formless gapes between rare shadows. Men in blue overalls and monstrous black hats were sitting on walls, fences and benches in the sun.
These men were spare, long and springy as whips. Some walked with guns behind their backs, or sat with their long ungainly legs propped up or pulled out across the pavement. They had lengthy, calculating noses, and judicious deprecatory chins. They rarely moved. But they saw everything.
One knew this by the sensitive jerking of the crowns of their hats, if a Ford car clattered by or if a cannonade of blasting pealed on the new road, or if a stranger crossed brazenly into the sun, and had his boots cleaned. Wind blew in casually, as everything else did.
The only thing to do in the town was to find a foot of unoccupied bench and sit on it. I sat. I sat for hours and watched better men than I—also sitting.
I sat on the wall of the bridge first of all, and soon another sitter there began to edge toward me. We inspected each other from under the brims of our hats. Our eyes reconnoitered. We tried to give our inevitable, approaching acquaintanceship a strategic casualness, as though it were an accident and not a matter of passionate curiosity.
The man was an Indian half-caste. His eyes were thick, cloudy and red hot. He pulled at his yellow, twiggy mustache and stared at the river. He said ultimately: “Thar’s right smart o’ fish in th’ river. Catfish. Yellow catfish and blue uns. An’ a redfeller—red horse like we call him.”
The sun wheeling like a white stream filled in the hollow of broken silence, leveled it up and flowed over as though nothing had happened. The half-caste pulled in his belt and let his length of leg dangle forward, and so stepped away as it were on tiptoe, like a marionette.
“Reckon I’ll turn aroun’ and seek arter a bit o’ grub,” he said. And he went to the barber’s doorstep and sat there in the shade.
The mountains lay in masterful elevation around the town and descended into it. Their ardent slopes, green-pored and filigreed, rose to every touch of sun. There were cool smoky blue forms of shadows modeled into the body of the ranges. A bare heat, like the look in an animal’s eyes, and a prolific coarseness and toughness, as of a bullock’s hide, were in the mountains. They stood like herds of green bison. The little town seemed within the casual print of a great mountain hoof.
I climbed up a stairway into the shade, and shortly a man came up and sat on the stair below me. He was oldish, agile, with stringy red skin, and a fistful of mustache stuffed under his nose like straw. He wore one brown boot and one black boot. We fell into conversation.
He had lived in the mountains all his life and knew every creek of them. He was very scornful of the “ol’ fellers” of the previous generation, and especially of their queer ways, speech and customs. And he fed his scorn on the constant reading of a book describing the amusing life of the mountaineers.
He referred to them as “ol’ crackters.”
“Wan he came hyur and writ thata book he writ the truth. Hit’s jes the way the ol’ fellers uster speak. They was a quare c’llection. He’s a right smart boy, and the travelin’est man I knowed. He’s seed the whole worl’ except two states and now he jes stays foolin’ aroun’ writin’.”
His reference was to that noted writer on the mountains, Horace Kephart.
I led him gently to reminiscence.
“I’ve bin four times over Clingman’s Dome. Thar hain’t no trail, but twen’y y’ars ago a feller cut a wagon trail, figgerin’ he waur going to haul lumber along the top. But I reckon that’d be covered plumb up with laurel an’ trees, the way nobody wouldn’t never know it.
“I’ve done purty smart o’ b’ar huntin’, sometimes with the snow that high. B’ars is harmless an’ is jes as afeered of you as you is o’ them. Thar hain’t no real reason fer huntin’ up so, either. Rattlesnakes is the same. Reckon all animals is like that. Don’t harm them an’ they won’t touch ye.
“Waal, hit’s mighty dense up thar and terrible rough. If ye get up on top of the Dome and shins up a tree a man could see everywhars in the worl’ almos’ till—till his eyes was a-tired o’ lookin’, an’ he come down an’ go away. But ye hafter climb. The Dome’s too coveredly wi’ trees to see without.
“Yeh, I’ve had many experiments with b’ars,” he continued. “Pete Hughes was the real boy fer b’ars, though. He fell into a b’ar wallow on the Dome one day an’ lit plum’ on top o’ the greates’ ol’ b’ar he’d ever seed, and kinda got into a reg’lar spat with him. Reckon that’s in the book, too. Wane’er the ol’ boy heered summat good like that he made a note of it so’s not to disremember.
The Pritchett Century Page 15
