by James Still
My overarching assumption in selecting definitive texts of Still’s previously published short stories was that Still himself preferred the last-published version of each story, because he had guided that version of that particular story through multiple editorial processes over the years. (He left no instructions voicing discontent with the last-published versions of any of his short stories.) While a number of Still’s short fictional pieces were subsequently incorporated into novels, I included those original pieces in this collection because Still himself endeavored to ensure that they were initially published as short stories. (This seems to be supported by the fact that three of the pieces that were incorporated into River of Earth—“Job’s Tears,” “So Large a Thing as Seven,” and “Bat Flight”—had previously been published independently in major literary periodicals as well as reprinted in the prestigious O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories series.) This collection features versions of two short stories taken directly from the text for Still’s Sporty Creek—“The Force Put” and “Plank Town”—in part because there were not any previously published periodical versions of those stories (“The Force Put” originally appeared in River of Earth) and also because within the emphatically episodic structure of Sporty Creek those two story texts worked essentially as stand-alone narratives.
In transcribing the short stories for inclusion in The Hills Remember, I let stand Still’s many uses of dialectal speech, though I attempted to standardize orthographic representations of certain dialectal words and phrases across this volume when such standardization did not adversely affect a story’s aesthetic integrity and rhythmic flow. Readers should note that Still’s short stories received often dramatically different editorial treatment from various editors over the years, and absolute standardization of his distinctive literary rendering of Appalachian dialectal speech across such a large body of stories was neither possible nor advisable, given the fact that each of Still’s stories was constructed out of a singular blending of formal and informal stylistic elements. I have corrected all obvious spelling or grammatical errors that appeared in the last-published versions of these stories.
And what does the chronological arrangement reveal about Still’s trajectory as a crafter of short fiction? The early stories (from the 1930s to 1941) reflect Still’s discovery of his primary subject matter—the people and folk culture he encountered in and around his adopted eastern Kentucky home. During this period, Still was experimenting with using Appalachian dialect, and thus his Depression-era short stories (and accordingly River of Earth) are infused with his brilliant literary approximation of Appalachian speech. Still’s wartime and postwar short stories exhibit a more direct narrative style, employing a sparer approach to language and a more restrained use of dialect. Noteworthy for their acuity of psychological vision, these later stories examine complex characters in tightly structured narratives, and during this latter period Still proved his mastery of writing short fiction from tragic as well as comic perspectives.
Still’s short stories constitute the connecting link between his poetry, the genre he investigated earliest and that provided him with a form for experimenting with language, and his novels, which granted him the opportunity to assess the full, contextualized life of a character or a family. His short stories expanded upon the strengths of his poems and ultimately encouraged his imagination to explore the extended narrative novel form. In his haunting and resonant short stories, Still distilled his visions and his values into minimalist landscapes. Indeed, to many readers his short stories seem closer to outpourings from the oral tradition than to conventional, self-consciously composed “literary works.” They stand out as evocative and timeless yet remarkably simple tales and legends from the soul of Appalachia.
Please visit The Hills Remember book page at www.kentuckypress.com for a glossary of dialectical words and phrases, quotations, photographs, audio clips, and more information about the life and works of James Still.
Sweet Asylum
The blooming of the late Elberta peach trees on the east side of the house and the disappearance of Caesar Middleton’s winter growth of beard were simultaneous declarations of spring’s triumph over late frost and recurring quinsy—a sign more reliable than the first mockingbird, or the sudden vapid lengthening of Blue Jonny’s weather string.
Middleton’s customary ritual, the careful grooming of his beard into a masterpiece of tonsorial workmanship, was foregone this April morning. He came downstairs at five-thirty for his usual breakfast, a ration of white meat fried in buttermilk batter, hot biscuit, and coffee. After the third cup of the viscous black liquid from Aunt Sage’s coffee pot, he tapped the pewter saltcellar impatiently with his spoon. Aunt Sage hurried in from the kitchen, wiping the sticky remnants of ribbon cane syrup from her purple lips as she came.
“No more coffee in the mustache cup,” Middleton commanded. The sharp edge of an early awakening was in his voice. Aunt Sage jerked her head affirmatively, the labyrinthian maze of her braided hair raising for a moment like a mat puffed out by the wind as she bent to take his plate away, and settling again on her head with the orderliness of black honeycomb.
“Take a kettle of hot water upstairs for my shaving,” he continued when sufficient time had elapsed for a scrupulous mental recording of his first demand, “and tell Blue Jonny to bridle the bay mare.” He slid his chair back noisily over the stained oak floor. Standing beside the table, he occupied himself for a moment with a toothpick, jerking it back and forth between pursed lips in a series of nervous jabs, the edge of his dental plate clicking against the sliver of wood.
He was aware suddenly as he dropped the toothpick into the mustache cup of a poignant aloneness, the emptiness of the three-leaved table, the elegiac air of the paneled room, the smoky-faced clock over the china closet. But this sentimental eruption was only momentary, a throwback to the late nineties when his wife and three sons sat here in this room with him, talking in conversational vagaries. He could not remember one sentence, preserved in its entirety, that was uttered here during all those years. His wife had died, his sons had grown out of his home and influence, and now there remained only the level atmosphere of commonplaceness marked with a cenotaph of chairs and a table. The white lightning of nerves and opinions had not struck in those days.
He found his shaving mug in the cupboard. A vague recollection of some attached sentiment, a birthday or a holiday gift, irritated him. Grasping it by the thick porcelain handle, he marched up the stairs, depositing it with a clatter on the washstand.
A minute examination of his beard awakened him to a dismal reality that the graying strands had hastened a majority over the red since September. Another year and the sneaking frost of his sixty-five years will have left white and chastened the last bright relic of youth: he would be one with the autumnal cotton fields, the white shroud of pear blossoms beside the smokehouse.
As the beard fell away from his face before the measured sweeps of the blue steel razor, his brain fomented rebellion. Old age, impotence, enough! Senility did not fit into the fixed canons of his judgment. Time would come, he saw plainly, when he must make a frank acceptance of nature and its unfathomable ways or be lost in the morass of accumulating years. This stark loneliness that pinched his soul with the increasing years was mastering him of late. He needed someone to pluck him out of it. The new agrarianism, the young generation of planters knocking their heads together for commercial sport, were too clearly pointing out his fogginess and the inescapable fact that he belonged to a past generation of economic recklessness.
In the grosser areas of his thinking there were fresh and unforgettable memories of mortgages, notes, endless duns. During the nine-year transition from forty-cent to seven-cent spot cotton, he had not sold a bale, voluntarily joining the ranks of the land poor. There were ninety-six bales stored in the field barn, held there by the determination to get fifteen cents or let it rot where it was. Many the time during these intervening years his voice had become momen
tarily husky with pride in his stubbornness; now, as he thought of it, he doubted the common sense of his judgment. His rope of sand was crumbling. Gentility was no longer a sweet asylum, a wall between himself and crass materialism. Pride seemed rather puny now with debts that were more pressing this spring than he had known before. There were few merchants at Christopher he did not owe, and who were not inspired by the one-cent rise in cotton with a new urgency to collect.
He winced at his thoughts, and at the steady pull of the razor. A drop of blood upon his cheek suddenly cleared his mind for more intent concentration upon his shaving and lent a greater flexibility to his jaws as he twisted them into grotesque shapes so that the razor might pass over an unwrinkled surface.
An hour later Middleton came out into the front yard and waited by the green trellis of Lady Penzance roses until Blue Jonny brought the mare from the lot. The eagerness of new awakening life, the mouse-eared leaves on the water oaks, and the subtle sweetness of plum blossoms stirred him immeasurably. Something as miraculous as the sap that stirs the oak seemed to swell in his blood. He sprang into the saddle, secretly marveling at his unexpected litheness. The pendulum had truly swung backwards!
Shortly before ten o’clock Middleton passed the city limit post of the county seat. Squatty bungalows, salmon-tinted stucco dwellings, architectural mushrooms outside the aristocratic walls of Christopher proper, crowded the red clay banks above the road. When the quiet magnolia-shaded avenues were reached, he allowed the bay mare to fall into a slow walk, arranged his black tie, and tilted his faun-gray hat to a more personable angle.
The home of the late Judge Stroud, sitting obliquely at the corner of Waverly and Tillers avenues, came into view beneath the ancient trees. Middleton could see the copper-colored bricks through the leafless tangle of ivy flowing up to the mansard roof. White voile curtains fluttered out of the windows fronting on the wide veranda.
Mrs. Stroud was not in sight, a fact that sorely disappointed him. There was an air of lifelessness about the place; the ivy on the walls and the crepe myrtle had not yet joined in the green renascence of spring. It seemed that they only waited for her to appear and reanimate them with her benign smile that was more of June, he remembered, than of April. Forty years ago he had known her as Lala Radcliff, and there had been that gentle understanding between them that four decades had failed to thoroughly erase. Her father had favored a lawyer, a man after his own profession and heart rather than a gentleman farmer, and she had not disappointed him. Those were the days of paternal obedience, courage, and self-abnegation.
There on his jogging mare, one of those rare moments of understanding came to him. The white light of decision emerged from some subcutaneous quality of his reasoning, laying his way clear and tearing away the veil of years of less inspired reasoning and opinions. This day he would sell his cotton, whatever the price, lift the first mortgage off the homeplace, and clear up the most irritating debts. In the early afternoon he would visit Lala. Forty years could not have made any great difference; love springs eternal, passion flows as infinitely as rivers to the sea, nothing is irrevocable.
There were other considerations that kept intruding into his thinking quite apart from the satisfactions of refurbished love. Was it his subtle business acumen working after a quarter of a century of decadence? Before his death Judge Stroud held the second mortgage on the Middleton homeplace. That he had not foreclosed prior to his toppling from the judge’s rostrum into his grave was due to the faith of the first mortgage holders. The Judge’s entire estate had gone to his wife. Lala now held that second mortgage, a scrap of paper so innocent, yet so potent in its barefaced power.
Middleton barely glanced at the Stroud house as he passed, a habit achieved since the second mortgage had gone to rest under its eaves. He knew Lala was there, sewing perhaps; then it occurred to him that he had never seen Lala do anything except smile exquisitely, lean gracefully in doorways and hold her beautiful hands. Forty years ago Lala’s chief care had been the protection and nourishment of her flowerlike beauty. All other feminine concerns were vulgar beside this one splendid desire to preserve that which no other young lady in Christopher possessed in such abundance and delicacy.
Forty years had not gone without some withering effect, but time had laid its hand lightly upon her with increasing gentility and mellowness. She had become less willowlike and fastidious in person, more studied and even-tempered in manner. These were observations he had made eight years ago, before Judge Stroud’s death; since, she had buried herself behind the brick masonry of her home, no longer attending the social functions or riding out into the country in her tasseled carriage. He heard of her rarely now.
Middleton rode unhurriedly into the square, the fort of his creditors whose half-cloistral business houses faced it on four sides. He noticed with mild surprise that a retrenching county government had desecrated the first floor of the courthouse with the office of a loan company and a barber shop since he had last been there. There was no less dignity in his arrival because the square was practically deserted, as might be expected on a Wednesday, or for reasons of his late indulgence in a mental somersault. He hitched the mare to one of the posts swarming with sparrows on the south side and made his way through dust shoe-mouth deep to the cracked pavement.
Miss Phearing thrust her waspish head out of the door of the Ladies Wear Shoppe and smiled professionally.
“Nice day,” she beamed as he came up. Middleton raised his hat solemnly.
“We could do with some rain,” he said, stamping his feet to clear the dust from his shoes. With that he passed on. Ordinarily he would have chatted with Miss Phearing for at least a half hour, remembering as she poured out meticulous details about nothing in particular, that her state of perpetual eligibility had gone unchallenged these twenty years. This day more weighty matters claimed his attention.
At the entrance to the house of Rucker S. Winningham, cotton buyers and dealers in tenant necessities, salt, meat, lard and flour, he paused to read the final ginners report for the past season. Alabama, 930,000 bales. Cotton quotation, April 6th, Spot Cotton 7 cents. The one-cent gain still held. Turning into the store he was halted by a lusty slap on the back. It was Rogan, the county tax assessor.
“Mighty glad you came into town today,” Rogan said.
Middleton looked with sudden contempt at this suspected display of office-holding authority.
“Would have called you on the phone last night,” Rogan went on, “but you know there ain’t no privacy on the county line.”
“Now Mr. Rogan,” Middleton began firmly, “if it concerns taxes, I’ll be seeing you in your office before I leave town today.”
Rogan smiled damply. “It ain’t that exactly,” he said. “I’ve got an idea where I can help you.”
“Help me?” Middleton was incredulous. “I’ve almost forgotten about you being up for reelection. That’s a standing order with you, Rogan. The tax assessor’s office hasn’t been out of your family in my memory.”
“Let’s go where we can talk,” Rogan said.
They went inside among the sacks of cottonseed hulls.
“There ain’t no getting around me wanting your vote,” Rogan began, “but I ain’t asking you for nothing. Ain’t I always been careful when I assess your property? Live and let live, that’s me. But what I specially wanted to tell you was what the Christopher Business Men’s Club decided on yesterday. There are fifty-two members and everyone is going to buy from one to ten bales of cotton from the farmers at twelve cents a pound. That’s five cents more than market price. Naturally they expect to get most of it back on debts. Still they’ll be helping out in a pinch.”
“Where do I come in?” Middleton asked impatiently. Rogan rubbed his palms together until they rasped like dry leather.
“I’m going to buy ten bales off you, that is, if you’ll come across with a promise to sort of use your influence in the election next August. The idea of the cotton buying was to help the s
mall farmer, the ones that raise just a couple of bales a year and stay hog-tied half the time. You’ve got all the cotton you’ve raised in ten years, but I know the traces ain’t pulling so easy. You ain’t to let anybody know I bought it off’en you, though.”
“That sounds like sense to me,” Middleton warmed.
“I could manage more than that if you’d sort of strain yourself for me in Beat Four.” Rogan spoke in deep earnestness. His face tightened into a mass of threadlike wrinkles.
“Could you rid me of twenty or thirty?” Middleton was smiling cannily.
“Ten is all I can swing on my own hook,” Rogan said regretfully, “still I think I can work it around so the other club members will buy some from you. At least forty bales, if you’ll promise to carry Beat Four for me.”
“How would you work that,” Middleton asked pointedly.
Rogan’s hands were working with a sort of visionary anticipation.
“I’ll ask about a dozen merchants,” he said, “the ones you owe. Each one might buy several bales from you. My job does give me a little persuasive influence. They’ll buy if I ask them to special. They’ll think they are the only ones buying from you. And we’ll do it on the quiet.”
Middleton leaned back against the sacks of hulls. “I’ve got ninety-four bales in my field barn,” he said. “If you’ll sell every bale of it, Beat Four will go ninety percent for you. You know the people are pretty near going to clean out that courthouse this time. Nothing short of a miracle can keep you in office. Beat Four votes would go a long way.”
