The Hills Remember

by James Still

  Abner said, “A body never knows when they’ll meet a killer, by day or by night.”

  “I have no known enemies,” I said.

  Abner thumped the handle of his knife, causing it to vibrate. “Didn’t you mix-up in a killing over at Linemark a few years back?”

  “I witnessed a shooting.”

  “I mean you spoke up when you could o’ kept sort of quiet, not helped stir a mess.”

  “The Grand Jury summonsed me, and later I was summonsed to testify at the trial.”

  “You tuk sides, I hear.”

  “I knew neither the slayer nor the slain.”

  John said, “The way you tell it I can’t make heads or tails of the shooting.”

  “John,” I said, “you’ve reminded me of my turn on the witness stand. The commonwealth’s attorney was questioning me when a lawyer for the defense jumped to his feet and appealed to the judge, ‘The witness is using such big words the jury can’t understand what he’s saying.’ ”

  Abner insisted, “I’ve heard it two or three ways. What’s the straight?”

  “The straight is this,” I said, making a show of patience. “I saw a person lift a gun and fire, and I saw another fall to the ground.”

  “That trouble the reason you moved over here, backside of the county?”

  “I lived on at Linemark for five years.”

  Though my explanation obviously didn’t satisfy Abner, he moved on to further inquiry. “I heard a sketch about this chap at Linemark Schoolhouse, and there was a ruckus, and you in the middle of it.

  “A fellow tried to break up a school program. It was just a question of who would put on the show, the Linemark School chaps or a fun-box in the audience.”

  Wace mumbled, “How’d it end?”

  “The fun-box won.”

  Abner hastened his investigation. “Last winter, down in Leckett County, there happened a bad killing. And where was you? Right on the spot, big as life.”

  “An accidental witness.”

  Abner pulled his cattle knife from the log and snapped the blade into its case. “After all the scrapes you’ve horned in on, you oughten to live without body protection.” His voice grew earnest. “Knock the stuck bullet out of the hog-rifle. Buy a strong knife.”

  I folded my Barlow. “This plug has served my purposes pretty well.”

  Abner arose. He sighted the time of day by the sun; he shifted his feet, ready to leave. Then he turned and lifted an arm toward me. We shook hands again. He declared solemnly, “All I’ve spoken today is in your behalf. Just wanted the straight of the truth. And I say guard yourself. Who knows when a rascal will be met?”

  “Who knows?” I said.

  When the stream lowered in the fall, Abner bought an old truck and drove it up Mule to the mouth of Ivy. The stone-locked bed of the branch proved impassable and the truck was left at the mouth. In early December he and his family sledded their household goods down the branch, loaded the truck, and drove away.

  A few days after Abner moved, I walked into the storehouse at the Foot and B. J. Claymore greeted me, “Good-bye, Abner Stegall.” Claymore sat in the post-office corner, writing in a ledger, and he eyed me to see how I took the news. After a moment of silence he added, “Moved, pulled stakes, gone the road.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  While Claymore worked, I drew a chair to the stove. I recruited the fire and set the iron seams winking. One of my feet had slipped into a hole of water coming down, and I rested it upon the iron apron. The door of the storehouse, ajar for light, let in a steady flow of cold air along with the grayness of middle afternoon, and I alternately shivered and baked. By the time my shoe began to steam, Claymore banged together the halves of the ledger and joined me at the stove.

  “Zizzards,” Claymore chuffed. “Tonight will freeze clappers in cowbells.” He filled a coffeepot and placed it on the stove. He reached into a sack and pulled forth a yellow apple. “Eat it,” he said. “That’s a Golden Delicious, out of my own orchard.”

  I ate the apple, and I asked, “Where’s everybody?”

  Claymore shrugged. “Gone home.”

  The coffee boiled. Claymore fetched cups, blew the dust out, handed one to me, saying, “I reckon hardly a dozen have drunk from it since the last washing.” We stirred lumps of brown sugar into the coffee with splinters off the kindling pile; we talked, and mostly about Abner. Claymore believed the Stegalls had moved either to Bug Dust or to the new mine in Old Virginia we had lately heard much about. The new mine had a fourteen-foot vein, and a body could work standing up, and it was said coal flowed through the driftmouth like a stream in tide. But Claymore decided, “I can’t picture Ab in a mechanical mine. Beyond a doubt he moved to Bug Dust.”

  While we drank the coffee, Claymore told of Abner’s changed attitude toward me. “He was set pine-blank against you till the showdown on Harls Branch. That day you made a bud out of him.” He grinned, “Next shipment o’ good knives I get, I’ll sell you one for cost.” And Claymore mentioned his settlement with Abner. “He came in here last week and asked, ‘How much do I owe?’ and says, ‘Here ’tis.’ ” Claymore seemed impressed by Abner’s unexpected bounty. “Well, he paid his debts, settled with the ledger. That speaks good for him.”

  “How did Abner make a living?” I inquired. “He raised a small garden patch, nothing else. And I understand he never hired out for wages.”

  Claymore looked wry, his eyes sharpened. “The same question exactly he asked about you once.” He didn’t comment further.

  We finished the coffee. My foot got dry.

  I bought a two-pound poke of salt and five pounds of sugar. I received no mail, so Claymore gave me an old newspaper. As I lifted the pokes to depart, Claymore said, “Now you can travel up Ivy Branch any time the notion strikes.”

  “That’s the long way around,” I reminded, though I felt tempted to go that day, despite weather and distance.

  The wind blew full in my face as I started upcreek, and I walked along slowly, half of a mind to visit Ivy Branch. At the first turn of the valley, where the mountain broke the wind’s force, I paused. The afternoon was perishing, and it was turning colder, but I bethought myself I could spend the night in the old Malahide house, and go home on the morrow. I crossed Mule, passed the Foot on the farther side of the creek, and trod a carpet of willow leaves to the mouth of Ivy.

  On the banks of Mule, trenched sand mapped the backings and turnings of Abner’s truck. The white sand bore dark stains as if a wounded beast had crawled there and bled. Along Ivy I found the tracks of sled runners and calculated four round-trips had been necessary to haul Abner’s goods. The waters of the branch were low and shone with a golden cast, due to a seepage of natural petroleum. I was once told that during a spell of extreme drought the branch had dried to oily pools of such richness they could be lighted by a match, and Abner’s children had played at burning off the waters. I passed the sawmill site where lay the giant flywheel of a steam engine. I hurried on. Higher, along the ridgetops, the wind soughed, but the valley floor held a breathless, unmoving chill.

  A mile and a quarter along I reached the old Malahide place. The doors hung wide. Dry weed stalks in the yard were plumed with feathers from a rent bed-tick. A hen clucked among the bluing weeds, and I wondered that she had escaped the foxes. In the yard knelt a kitchen stove, one front leg bent underneath, the other buckling. A girl-child’s slippers, too new for casting away, sat forgotten on the top doorstep.

  I walked around, through the house, barn, and cellar, and along paths to the spring and garden. I wondered at the number of fruit jars lined by the cellar wall and under the kitchen floor. Blue slivers of broken jars were scattered about, which must have made perilous the steps of barefoot children. The house and grounds bespoke careless living and hasty departure, but the woodyard was in good order. A master woodchopper had labored there, and expertly chopped sticks for stove and fireplace were evenly sized and stacked, and the chips heaped neatly into pil
es.

  With a bush top I swept the planking of the big room, and I brought in wood and built a fire. The chimney drew smoke lazily, I recall. There seemed a clog in the chimney. I closed the door and the draft mended. After warming, I dug in the garden, unearthing a hatful of Irish potatoes and a few onions; I found a stalk of red peppers shining in the dead grass. I fetched springwater in a lard pail. And when the ball of the sun dropped behind the ridge, I played fox. I caught the hen as she wended to roost.

  By nightfall the hen simmered in a battered aluminum pot, and I cooked her slowly and long, adding potatoes, onions, and a red pepper. I wished Abner might have had a taste, for once in his presence Hask Wycherly had remarked that at mealtime I took a handful of salt into the vegetable patch and dined like a rabbit; and Abner, fully believing, had asked, “What, now, does he eat of a winter?” Hask had replied, “Lives on salt, I reckon.” The stew turned out satisfactorily, even if a bit stringy. I ate the last mouthful.

  I read the newspaper Claymore had given me, then spread it before the hearth and lay upon it. I watched the dying fire, and I remember the dark moss of soot waving along the chimney’s back. Had I drawn my head closer to the fire and glanced up, I might have seen a coil of metal in the throat of the chimney. Abner’s brass distillery worm was found there the next spring by one of Hod Parson’s boys.

  Sunstroke on Clabber Creek

  The last food jars had been given out at the relief center on Dry Creek when Sebe Hammers pushed through the crowd. “I shore want you to git over to my homeseat this day,” he said. “You hain’t never been thar. The other govermint visitor was scairt of my woman. I reckon she is a grain crazy, but she wouldn’t harm a hair.”

  Sebe was a short man, firm and heavy, and built close to the ground. He stood there wiping his raw eyes with a handkerchief, a small print square of cloth you could have pitched broomstraws through. It hardly covered his horny palm. The crowd looked at him and at the handkerchief. He held it up, and the red print flowers were bright in the sun. It was a woman’s handkerchief. “I want you to see how rail pore folks live,” he said.

  Sebe was afoot. My horse-mule, Sugartop, had a saddle-boil and we couldn’t ride double. I set out walking with Sebe, leaving the nag behind in Sol Jefferson’s stall. We took up Trace Hollow and over the ridge with the sun-ball beating down on our backs. A scope of clouds lay flush with the hills toward Angus Creek, but there was nothing overhead to break the heat.

  We stopped under the half-shade of a clump of haws going down yonside of the ridge. Blades of heat strained through the leaves, burning like points of light under a sunglass. “Hit’s shore a hot day,” Sebe said. “I reckon it’s the hottest day ever was.” I wiped the salt sweat from my eyes with my shirttail and lay back upon the steamy ground, resting. Sebe saw I had no handkerchief. He held the damp ball of cloth toward me but I shook my head. He wiped the red rims of his eyelids and spread the scrap of cloth in the sun to dry.

  “Reckon you’ve got trachoma?” I asked.

  “Hit’s jist a leetle sore-eye I got,” he said. “And I jedge hit catchin’.”

  Leaber Flint was waiting at the ridge-foot for us. He had heard our brogans rattling the rocky trail. “We hain’t got a dustin’ o’ meal in the house,” he said. “Me and my woman and chaps is livin’ hard as nails. They hain’t enough grease in the bucket to fry a strip o’ sowbelly. I figger the govermint is bound to do somethin’.”

  He led us through a huckleberry thicket to his puncheon slab house set under the hill. An old hen pecked in the yard, and there were three small naked children looking at us through a paling fence. Leaber’s wife came to the door with a baby at her breast. “Them children’s got a dress apiece,” she said, “but hit’s been so hot I let ’em pull ’em off. I heard tell hit does them good to git their hides tanned.”

  It was cool in the house, and dark after the bright sunlight. The air was musty and rank. There was one bedstead covered with dirty quilts and a rotting shuck-mattress. The stove was propped on two stacks of flat rocks. Beside it a pile of ashes rose from the floor almost as high as the stove itself. They had been wet down to keep them from scattering. The meal barrel was empty, smelling like a rat’s nest. The grease bucket had a fistful of lard in it.

  Leaber followed me through the house, brushing his hands over his scrubby beard. When we went outside again I sat down on the steps, writing a few words in a notebook. I had got overheated. My eyes burned as I followed the lines, and a dull ache, black as a thunderhead, lay behind them.

  Leaber talked on as I wrote. “I’m patchin’ me two acres o’ corn but that won’t nigh feed my woman and chaps. I hain’t got no garden. Hit’s been dry as bones. Anyway we et up the seeds in March. Now if I had me some seeds hit’s still too hot. Plants is mighty timid a-comin’ on right now.”

  When we had cooled off we walked on down Clabber Creek, staying close under the thin willow shade. My face and hands burned with the prickly heat, the sweat poured from my forehead, and my hair was sobby under the hot vacuum of my hat. A sharp thorn of pain struck backward from my eyes into my brain.

  Lim Conners called us in for a drink of springwater. The windowless rooms of his house were clean and the floors yellow-white from scrubbings with a shuck mop. The rope-strung beds were billowing white with ticks filled with chicken feathers. But there were flies swarming about us in the dogtrot. They bit us and we kept busy slapping at them.

  Another mile down the creek, John Stoll’s widow called to us to come in and eat a bite. Sebe hollered back that I was going to have a meal with him. As we walked on he told me about the nit-brained child at the Stoll place. “John Stoll ought to a-killed one man afore he died,” Sebe said. “Big Coll Tolbert come to his house drunk while his wife was a fur piece along and scairt her so the girl-child was marked when hit was borned. John was a-layin’ off to spike Big Coll, but he got hisself sawed up at a stave mill afore he got a chanct.”

  My head ached fiercely as we walked, the pain wavering before my eyes like the pulsing heat over the stones ahead. My face was no longer wet. It was hot and dry, the heat seeming to boil inside me without being able to get out. Clabber Creek stretched endlessly before us. The water was thick and glassy and seemed not to move at all. As the sun-ball turned overhead we came to the mouth of Short Fork, and to Sebe Hammer’s house. It sat back in an old apple orchard, and we walked up to it through rows of bean poles.

  “Don’t you mind my ole woman none,” Sebe said. “She’s puore crazy.”

  Two mangy hounds challenged us from the puncheon steps and dived headlong under the house when Sebe threw a chunk at them. Lulu, Sebe’s wife, stood on the porch. She looked at me out of nervous eyes, brown as peach-stones between raw lids, and reached out a moist hand. “Yore furrin to Short Fork,” she said. “We hain’t never seed you afore, but yore a welcome body if you kin put up with pore folks’ ways.” She went back into the dark shade of the house. As we cooled on the porch we could hear her working over the stove, and the hoarse clucking of her voice singing an Old Regular hymn. “My woman is right quietlike this day,” Sebe said.

  My head was feeling like a water bucket by now—large, hot, and hollow. In the shade the heat still danced before my eyes. I had come near a sunstroke, I thought. I wanted to sit still, and not to move at all, but presently Sebe took me around the house to the barn. The hip roof had its back broken. The logs were rotten and worm-eaten. There were only shucks and knotty corncobs in the crib. He had no cow. There was a razorback pig with a belly flat as a flitter in a pen. “Hit won’t be meat till first frost,” Sebe said. “I hain’t got a grain o’ nothin’ to feed hit on. I jist pull weeds and feed hit, but they hain’t got enough fleshnin’ to put an aidge on his teeth.”

  I asked about his plow-mule. Sebe twisted his face up and laughed. “Thar ain’t a nag on this Short Fork,” he said. “We’ve got a porely lot o’ folks on this creek. We all jist knock out our craps with a hoe. And hit’s pritty hard on the rheumatiz in my jint
s.”

  We sat down under the thick shade of an apple tree and Sebe told me about the folks on Short Fork. “We hain’t right healthy on this fork,” he said. “We air all kinfolks one way or ’nother. I’m squar’ kin to myself and back agin. We don’t git out much, and nobody comes in here. All the land is tuk up. Hit might do right good crappin’ if hit wasn’t standin’ on one end.

  “My woman is the only one thet’s crazy, but she hain’t got the breast complaint like some o’ the women. Sometimes I reckon I’m glad hit’s her brains thet’s weak and not her lungs thet’s bein’ et up with consumption. Oh we hain’t a healthy lot here on this fork. I reckon hit’s the fogs, and the damp hollers, and the sun not a-shinin’ in nigh more’n half the day.”

  Lulu called and we went in to eat. A table in the shed-room was set for us with two bucket-lid plates. There was a knife beside each plate but no fork or spoon. We scooped the shucky beans up with the broadside of the knife, fighting the flies off with one hand. They could sting like a bee if they lit.

  I was sick, and not hungry, but I ate a little and drank three cups of black coffee. The food fell into my stomach like lead. Lulu stood over us, watching every mouthful we ate, and I saw that she had Sebe’s handkerchief. She brushed her face with it, and held it up to see the red print flowers.

  After eating we sat on the porch again. “I’ll be puore thankful if the govermint kin do somethin’ for us folks on Short Fork,” Sebe said. “We’re ’bout to piddle out.” His words came as though through a fog. I was dull, and suddenly very sick. My dinner churned uncertainly in my stomach. I told Sebe I had to go, but I sat on with my chair leaned against the wall, and presently I slept.

  Lulu’s laughter wakened me. It was shrill and raucous. Sebe was holding her, calm and unmoved as one might hold an angry child, and she struck at him with her bony hands. She was mad, but she laughed. I jumped out of my chair. The floor seemed to swing under my feet.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said, and Sebe kept saying, “Hain’t no use to be scairt. She’s jist havin’ a spell. She won’t harm a hair.”