The Hills Remember

by James Still

  No amount of talking would have got me into that mess but I listened to how he was a-going to do it. I reckon it was slick because it was so simple. He was going to wade up Caney for a mile, blow his fox horn outside Sibo’s house, and when he came out take him between the eyes with his gun. Then he’d wade back down the creek. Clayt had been more careful about his tracks than anything else, saying a fellow couldn’t make tracks on a streak o’ water, which was right nigh the truth.

  We argued about where it would be best to take Sibo. I allowed behind the ear was the best place, just like you would a shoat at hog-killing time, but Clayt thought different. Between the eyes he says is the best place, and I got to reckoning if it was his killing he’d have the right to do it the way he wanted to.

  As the night come ’round for Clayt to do his business I got powerful uneasy. I wanted to let Sibo know somehow, but I figured I better keep my mouth out o’ Clayt’s doings.

  Well, Clayt done it just like he said he was a-going to. I heard it first thing the next morning and I tuk out for town. It’s a pretty good thing to be ’round and let folks see how clear your conscience is after such doings. And instead o’ going the shortcut through the gap I tuk right down Caney way, square by Sibo’s homeseat.

  When I come in sight thar was a powerful big crowd thar, but somehow I didn’t feel any longing to see Sibo in the fix he was in. As I come to the edge of the yard where it tetched the creek, Ransey come running down to stop me. Her eyes were red as beet pickles from crying, but she had her chin up, and I reckon she was prettier then than ever I seed her. I felt plumb sorry for her, and begin to wish I’d tipped her ole man off.

  “Pap has a hound dog in the cow stall that somebody says belongs to you. He’s had him for nigh three weeks and ain’t been able to find out who he belongs to. He’s been a-hanging ’round.”

  I begin to git sorrier than ever. It would tetch a body’s soul to see Ransey looking like that. I told her I was powerful sorry to hear about her pa. Then I asks her where he was shot at, in the forehead or behind the ear? I reckon I must have looked funny the minute I said that. I could have bit my tongue square off. She didn’t say nothing for a minute; then all of a sudden she screamed. You could have heard her a mile.

  These Goodly Things

  “It’s a sight on this green airth what that woman has done to this hollow,” Granny Henderson said, brushing a wisp of gray hair back neatly with a wrinkled hand and lifting her eyes toward the mountains rising before her cabin door. “Ain’t nary woman here in these Kentucky hills got the git up and go like Mrs. Keyes. She puore lives her religion.”

  I drained the glass of spring-cooled buttermilk Granny Henderson had just brought me and placed it upon the window sill. “Is Mrs. Keyes a mountainbred woman?” I asked.

  “Mrs. Keyes is furrin to these parts,” she said, settling herself in the willow rocker to tell me the whole story. “She come from somewhar outside the hills to teach a school here on the Left Hand Fork of Troublesome Creek nigh on ten years ago and she tuk right to us people, married her a man here and settled down jist like one o’ us. We thought she’d be high falutin’ at first but she’s the most humblest o’ God’s creatures. First thing we know she’s settin’ up waitin’ on Lige Jones’s wife, Lucy, and nussed her through a case o’ typhoid fever and nary another one of the family had it. Mrs. Keyes is always talkin’ about something called ‘sanitation,’ meanin’ by that keepin’ everything clean and biled out ’round sick folks. When Lucy got well, we knowed straight off the hand o’ the Lord was over her heart, and when she started out gittin’ everybody ’noculated she didn’t meet no argument like she would if she hadn’t already worked a cuore.

  “Next thing we knowed diphtheria broke out and she had a doctor come and he stuck some needles in all the children and was the last we heard o’ the chokin’ disease. Seems like thar warn’t no stoppin’ her though. She gethered up all the children with the eye disease and sont ’um on to the trachoma hospital. She said the govermint looked out after such things.

  “We ain’t never been much to visit. We’ve always stayed home and minded our own business, but Mrs. Keyes put a stop to it. She said it warn’t sociable, nor Christian. Afore we knowed it we was havin’ a sewin’ circle every Wednesday and ere we could complain we all liked it so much we jist kept it up.

  “She ain’t hardly got that started ere she got all the children goin’ to the schoolhouse fur Sunday school, and it shorely does a heart good to see them children walkin’ in the path o’ the Lord, larnin’ Bible verses, and sangin’ the purtiest songs about Jesus.

  “Then it ’pears to me lak she’s shorely got her hands full, but there ain’t no calculatin’ that good woman. She starts gittin’ books in from somewhar, books for chaps, stories, and things with big print fur the older folks. I’ve tuk to readin’ a powerful lot this winter on account o’ them books, and they’ve brightened many a lonesome day.”

  Granny Henderson paused and looked wistfully toward Mrs. Keyes’s home on Ivy Point. A thread of blue smoke was wavering from the chimney there upon the late afternoon breeze.

  “These people hereabout on Troublesome ought to appreciate Mrs. Keyes,” I said, wanting to hear more about her.

  “We do think a powerful lot o’ her,” Granny Henderson said, looking away again and smoothing her starched apron. “I asked her one day why she does all these goodly things fur us pore people and she jist laughs and says she reckons she is jist a selfish person after all because most of all in this world she wants to be happy and the only way she kin do that is to help other people be happy. Mrs. Keyes is puorely a Christian soul if there ever was one on God’s green airth.”

  All Their Ways Are Dark

  The mines on Little Carr closed in March. Winter had been mild, the snows scant and frost-thin upon the ground. Robins stayed the season through, and sapsuckers came early to drill the black birch beside our house. Though Father had worked in the mines, we did not live in the camps. He owned the scrap of land our house stood upon, a garden patch, and the black birch that was the only tree on all the barren slope above Blackjack. There were four of us children running barefoot over the puncheon floors, and since the year’s beginning Mother carried a fifth balanced on one hip as she worked over the rusty stove in the shed-room. There were seven in the family to cook for. With the closing of the mines, two of Father’s cousins came and did not go away.

  “It’s all we can do to keep bread in the children’s mouths,” Mother told Father. “Even if they are your blood kin, we can’t feed them much longer.” Mother knew the strings of “shucky” beans dried in the fall would not last until a new garden could be raised. A half-dozen soup bones and some meat rinds were left in the smokehouse; skippers had got into a pork shoulder during the unnaturally warm December, and it had to be thrown away. Mother ate just enough for the baby, picking at her food and chewing it in little bites. Father ate sparingly, cleaning his plate of every crumb. His face was almost as thin as Mother’s. Father’s cousins fed well, and grumblingly, upon beans and corn pone. They kicked each other under the table, carrying on a secret joke from day to day, and grimacing at us as they ate. We were pained, and felt foolish because we could not join in their laughter.

  “You’ll have to ask them to go,” Mother told Father. “These lazy louts are taking food out of the baby’s mouth. What we have won’t last forever.” Father did not speak for a long time; then he said simply: “I can’t turn my kin out.” He would say no more. Mother began to feed us between meals, putting less on the table. Father’s cousins would empty the dishes, then look sourly at their plates. They would wink, and thrust their brogans at each other under the table. They would chuckle without saying anything. Sometimes one of them would make a clucking noise in his throat, but none of us laughed, not even Euly. We would look at Father, his chin drooped over his shirt collar, his eyes lowered. And John’s face would be as grave as Father’s. Only the baby’s face would become bird-eyed and bright.r />
  When Uncle Samp, Father’s great-uncle, came for a couple of days and stayed on after the weekend was over, Mother spoke sternly to Father. Father became angry and stamped his foot on the floor. “As long as we’ve got a crust, it’ll never be said I turned my folks from my door,” he said. We children were frightened. We had never seen Father storm like this, or heard him raise his voice at Mother. Father was so angry he took his rifle-gun and went off into the woods for the day, bringing in four squirrels for supper. He had “barked” them, firing at the tree trunk beside the animal’s heads, and bringing them down without a wound.

  Uncle Samp was a large man. His skin was soft and white, with small pink veins webbing his cheeks and nose. There were no powder burns on his face and hands, and no coal dust ground into the heavy wrinkles of his neck. He had a thin gray moustache, over a hand-span in length, wrapped like a loose cord around his ears. He vowed it had not been trimmed in thirty years. It put a spell on us all, Father’s cousins included. We looked at the moustache and felt an itching uneasiness. That night at the table Father’s cousins ate squirrels’ breasts and laughed, winking at each other as they brushed up brown gravy on pieces of corn pone. Uncle Samp told us what this good eating put him in mind of, and he bellowed, his laughter coming deep out of him. We laughed, watching his face redden with every gust, watching the moustache hang miraculously over his ears. Suddenly my brother John began to cry over his plate. His shins had been kicked under the table. Mother’s face paled, her eyes becoming hard and dark. She gave the baby to Father and took John into another room. We ate quietly during the rest of the meal, Father looking sternly down the table.

  After supper Mother and Father took a lamp and went out to the smokehouse. We followed, finding them bent over the meat box. Father dug into the salt with a plough blade, Mother holding the light above him. He uncovered three curled rinds of pork. We stayed in the smokehouse a long time, feeling contented and together. The room was large, and we jumped around like savages and swung head-down from the rafters.

  Father crawled around on his hands and knees with the baby on his back. Mother sat on a sack of black walnuts and watched us. “It’s the first time we’ve been alone in two months,” she said. “If we lived in here, there wouldn’t be room for anybody else. And it would be healthier than that leaky shack we stay in.” Father kept crawling with the baby, kicking up his feet like a spoiled nag. John hurt his leg again. He gritted his teeth and showed us the purple spot where he had been kicked. Father rubbed the bruise and made it feel better. “Their hearts are black as Satan,” Mother said. “I’d rather live in this smokehouse than stay down there with them. A big house draws kinfolks like a horse draws nit-flies.” It was late when we went to the house. The sky was overcast and starless.

  During the night, rain came suddenly, draining through the rotten shingles. Father got up in the dark and pushed the beds about. He bumped against a footboard and wakened me. I heard Uncle Samp snoring in the next room; and low and indistinct through the sound of water on the roof came the quiver of laughter. Father’s cousins were awake in the next room. They were mightily tickled about something. They laughed in long choking spasms. The sound came to me as though afar off, and I reckon they had their heads under the covers so as not to waken Uncle Samp. I listened and wondered how it was possible to laugh with the dark and rain.

  Morning was bright and rain-fresh. The sharp sunlight fell slantwise upon the worn limestone earth of the hills, and our house squatted weathered and dark on the bald slope. Yellow-bellied sapsuckers drilled their oblong holes in the black birch by the house, now leafing from tight-curled buds. John and I had climbed into the tree before breakfast, and when Mother called us in we were hungry for our boiled wheat.

  We were alone at the table, Father’s cousins having left at daylight for Blackjack. They had left without their breakfast, and this haste seemed strange to Mother. “This is the first meal they’ve missed,” she said.

  Uncle Samp slept on in the next room, his head buried under a quilt to keep the light out of his face. Mother fed the baby at her breast, standing by Father at the table. We ate our wheat without sugar, and when we had finished Mother said to Father: “We have enough corn meal for three more pans of bread. If the children eat it by themselves, it might last a week. It won’t last us all more than three meals. Your kin will have to go today.”

  Father put his spoon down with a clatter. “My folks eat when we eat,” he said, “and as long as we eat.” The corners of his mouth were drawn tight into his face. His eyes burned, but there was no anger in them. “I’ll get some meal at the store,” he said. Mother leaned against the wall, clutching the baby. Her voice was like ice.

  “They won’t let you have it on credit,” she said. “You’ve tried before. We’ve got to live small. We’ve got to start over again, hand to mouth, the way we began.” She laid her hand upon the air, marking the words with nervous fingers. “We’ve got to tie ourselves up in such a knot nobody else can get in.” Father got his hat and stalked to the door. “We’ve got to do it today,” she called. But Father was gone, out of the house and over the hill toward Blackjack.

  Mother put the baby in the empty woodbox while she washed dishes. Euly helped her, clearing the table and setting out a bowl of boiled wheat for Uncle Samp. I went outside with John, and we were driving the sapsuckers from the birch when Uncle Samp shouted in the house. His voice crashed through the wall, pouring between the seamy timbers in raw blasts of anger. John was up the tree, holding on to the scaly bark, so I ran ahead of him into the shed-room. Mother stood in the middle of the floor listening. The baby jumped up and down in the woodbox. Euly ran behind the stove.

  I ran into the room where Uncle Samp was and saw him stride from the looking glass to the bed. His mouth was slack. A low growl flowed out of him. He stopped when he saw me, drawing himself up in his wrath. Then I saw his face, and I was frightened. I was suddenly paralyzed with fear. His face was fiery, the red web of veins straining in his flesh, and his moustache, which had been cut off within an inch of his lips, sticking out like two small gray horns. He rushed upon me, caught me up in his arms and flung me against the wall. I fell upon the floor, breathless and not uttering a sound. Mother was with me in a moment, her hands weak and palsied as she lifted me.

  I was only frightened, and not hurt. Mother cried a little, making a dry sniffling sound through her nose; then she got up and walked outside and around the house. Uncle Samp was not in sight. She came back and gave John the key to the smokehouse. “We’re going to move up there,” she said. “Go unlock the door.” I helped Euly carry the baby out of doors in the woodbox. We set him on the shady side of the woodpile. We began to move the furniture out, putting the smaller things in the smokehouse, but leaving the chairs, beds, and tables on the ground halfway between. The stove was heaviest of all, and still hot. The rusty legs broke off on one side, and the other two bent under it. We managed to slide it out into the yard.

  After everything had been taken out, we waited in the back yard while Mother went around the house again, looking off the hill. Uncle Samp was nowhere in sight, and neither Father nor Father’s cousins could be seen. Then she went inside alone. She stayed a long time. We could hear her moving across the floor. When she came out and closed the door, there was a haze of smoke behind her, blue and smelling of burnt wood.

  In a moment we saw the flames through the back window. The rooms were lighted up, and fire ran up the walls, eating into the old timbers. It climbed to the ceiling, burst through the roof, and ate the rotten shingles like leaves. John and I watched the sapsuckers fly in noisy haste from the black birch, and he began to cry hoarsely as the young leaves wilted and hung limp from scorched twigs. The birch trunk steamed in the heat.

  When the flames were highest, leaping through the charred rafters, a gun fired repeatedly in the valley. Someone there had noticed the smoke and was arousing the folk along Little Carr Creek. When they arrived the walls had fallen in, and Mot
her stood there among the scattered furnishings, her face calm and triumphant.

  Horse Doctor

  Ole Treble Finney’s mare was bound to die. I reckon Ole Treble thought more o’ that mare than he did his passel o’ young ’uns. And a powerful sight more’n he did his woman afore she left his house for him and the devil to lock horns in.

  Ole Treble was a mighty hard man to git along with. He’d kilt two men, I’d heered it told. And his wife had stripes on her like black runners where he’d beat her. She’d carry them marks to the grave, I heered it said.

  I reckon all o’ Treble’s sins piled together in a brashpile would look like a haystack o’ puore midnight.

  My pap and Ole Treble never lost no time callin’ each other brethren. Treble never allowed Pap was much of a hoss doctor. Once he had a jinny to die after he’d called Pap too late. He never got over that proper. A jinny’s got a time to die jist like a man. But Treble was quare like that. He always did thank more of his creatures than he did folks. Even his own blood kin.

  All Ole Treble ever said about Pap never done no harm. Pap kept gittin’ his license every year and his docterin’ kept him workin’ right peart. Oh I reckon they was a lot in the books Pap never larned. No man kin larn squar’ to the end o’ nothin’.

  But my pap knowed somethin’ that the doctor books don’t larn nobody. Pap had him a way with creatures that was passin’ anythang I ever seen or heered tell of. The fightinest dog would jist walk up to Pap and lick his boots. He could git a horse or a cow to lay down quiet for him to work on ’em.

  You ever see a baby that’s scairt o’ men folks? Won’t even let its own poppy come nigh? My pap could sort o’ go up to a leetle chap and they would stick out their arms and come to him.