The Hills Remember

by James Still

  I ran down the path through the beanstalks to the creek bank. I fell down in the hot sand, and my dinner came up in choking gusts. I couldn’t stop to get my breath, but when there was no more I got up and walked on, wavering along the path as it curled through the hot sun. My skin was dry as leather, parched as old poplar leaves.

  I thought about my horse-mule in Sol Jefferson’s stall six miles away and wondered if I’d ever make it. From there it was fourteen miles home.

  I walked a long time. The earth under my feet seemed to move and flow behind me. Then I was out of the valley and on the mountain, knowing that I had strayed, that I was lost. I knew I’d had a sunstroke, and that I’d have to keep going. To lie down was to die. There on the mountain the buzzards would pick my bones. It might be days before anyone came along this trail. I had to keep going.

  When I could walk no longer, I lay down in the middle of the path. If someone came along they would be sure to see me. They could not fail unless it was dark, and then a horse might step in my face. I reached into my pocket and found a handkerchief to wipe my mouth. Brushing it across my lips, I saw red print flowers bright upon the cloth. It was Sebe’s handkerchief. Lulu had put it in my pocket. I threw it down and rolled over to the edge of the path. There a mule or horse coming along the trail might not step on me, might shy away before they reached me. Then I drifted away in unconsciousness, not caring any more about buzzards or the feet of any animal.

  The Hay Sufferer

  He was eating radishes in my garden, a spider of a man no more than five feet in height, arms and legs bony, the skin of his face as weathered as the leather cap he wore. I had been at table eating a noon meal when I heard something sneeze and had come outside to investigate. “Hello?” I spoke into the yard. “Howdy,” a voice replied, and I discovered him squatting by the radish bed. He sneezed twice, in the manner of a cat. He reached a hand into a canvas budget beside him and got a handkerchief to brush his nose and dab at his moist eyes. “I’m a hay sufferer,” he said.

  “There are victuals on the table,” I invited, “and you’re welcome to eat.”

  “I’ve got my belly full now,” he declined. He popped a radish into his mouth, cheeks pouching like a squirrel’s, chewing with relish. It was late spring, the radishes fibrous at the heart and the tops ready to seed. “I’m here to clean out your well,” he said when the pulp was swallowed. “I got the word to come.”

  To my knowledge I hadn’t set eyes on him before and had sent no message; but my well needed drawing clear, the mud dished up and walls freed of web and root. Spiders had matted the stones inside the well-box, their silks glassy with trapped moisture; a honeyvine circled the well-box half around and runners pierced the crevices. The bucket snatched leaves with its ears in passing up and down. The water tasted swampy. And yet I asked, “The word? From whom did you get it?”

  “My business is well cleaning,” he said, muffling a sneeze, “and your neighbors below begged, ‘Stop at the place of the lone-living man on Mule Creek. When you come within a throw you’ll hear a typing box going like starving woodpeckers. Go, for he’ll never know to have his well freshened, snakes and lizards a-falling down, creating disease.’ I heard no typing box, but I thinks to myself, ‘They ought to be a house yonder, up them side-waters. I want to see that typing box.’ ”

  “I’m proud to get my well cleaned,” I said. In truth it hadn’t been done properly since I had come to live at the place, and I’d had to be content drawing the water off after rainy spells and fishing the bottom with frog gig and grabhooks. The well-top was a single slab of rock, with a bucket-hole chiseled in the middle, and only the smallest-boned of men could pass through. Here was one fitted by nature for the undertaking.

  He began to unlace his shoes. He rid chest and bladed shoulders of the shirt he wore. From the budget he drew work breeches, and he went behind the well-box to change. The breeches were wet, and I judged he had worked in a well downcreek. He called, “ ’Gin to raise the sour water.”

  While I drew off the water and threw it on the ground, the well digger rested in the shade of the honeyvines, his head thrown back against the stiff vines on a latch of arms, sneezing and talking. As the sweep had lately begun to guide to one side, striking the bucket against the far wall, I knotted a rope to a pail and raised the water by hand. Swift drawing was necessary to keep ahead of the seeping well-spring.

  “Climbing down wells is a blessing to a hay sufferer,” the fellow said. “Cool, dampy, no dust to the air. I’d be happy to live below when the weeds are spitting powder. All a man can do who’s poor to his pocket is to work in mines or dig wells, and both I’ve done. They struck me out of the mines on age. Now, the rich, I hear, go to live upon the oceans, shunning the rag blossom. Oh I’ve cried and snorted my life through.”

  He paused now and then to sniffle and sneeze and to wipe his eyes and nose. He told me a bit about himself. “Born in West Virginia, raised in Tennessee, come on a purpose to Kentucky. I’m a three-state citizen. Where mountains rise, I’m at home.” He’d had two wives and lost both by death. “Two women have waited on me,” he said. He had daughters living here and yon, Tennessee mostly, and a son in the north, he didn’t know where.

  And when he mentioned his son his words rang as if spoken into a churn. “We raised him sigoggling opposite to the right way. After four daughters we were tickled to have a man-child. We pampered and petted. Upon my word and honor he took to whiskey while a chap, went nigh direct from tit to bottle. I hided him scandalous, beat him till he got too big to handle. In jail and out he was for fifteen years, and me tomfool bailing him out. I’d not bail him now if he was frying in torment, for a lesson. Last year he got into bad trouble and headed north, and before he left he says, ‘Pap, I’ve taken my last drink, my final-last,’ and I was so sick to my heart over his sorry life I says, ‘The last is what the shoemaker killed his daddy with.’ He couldn’t stay sober and out of jail handcuffed to a preacher.”

  I drew the well as empty as could be got, and when the bucket began to rise with scarcely a cup of water he made ready to go down. He tied the rope to the sweep standard and raised tiptoe on child-sized feet upon the well cover to secure the knot. He swung his weight to test it. Tears fell from his eyes as incidentally as rain. He grasped the rope and spun into the well. The step-holes having long since fallen out, he descended hand over hand, his almost-prehensile feet clasping the rope. The mud on the bottom reached to the caps of his knees.

  He scooped mud into the bucket with his hands, and I drew it to the surface and heaped it aside to daub the cracks between the logs of the house. The mud smelled of flag-swamps, of ancient fern bogs, and I suspect of the fragrance of the earth on the first day of creation. To get such clay I would have had to go a distance up Laurel where high waters had uncovered a deposit. The clay is yellow while damp, drying to chalky white—a mortar and a paint costing only the elbow grease required to dig and transport, good to plug smoke leaks in a chimney, daub walls, and whiten fireplaces and hearths, and, I’ve been told, an excellent physic when pills of it are swallowed.

  I searched the watery mud, dribbling it up in the heap, discovering the pink joint of a crawdabber’s leg, a sodden handle of a drinking gourd, the lip and neck of a pitcher, willow leaves, and a house-cricket with hind legs drawn as for leaping and with antennae unbroken. When the last of the mud had been removed, the well cleaner hand-walked the rope to strip away the honeyvines, and he used a finger as a spindle upon which to wind the spiders’ webs. He jerked at the vines as if to remove them forever; he wrought a brief stay against the nature of the well. A season’s growth would replace the vine whips, the mud attain its accustomed depth after the first rainy spell, the spiders spread a new cloth overnight. He descended to the bottom again, calling up to me to lower a handful of table salt in the bucket, and when he had got it scattered it about. He stood below with clear water rising slowly about his ankles.

  I called down to him: “Are you ready to come
out?”

  His chin pointed upward. “I’m giving my lungs a vacation,” he said.

  He climbed out presently, eyes clear and dry, face screwed into a grin. “A wonder all that gom didn’t give you a disease,” he blurted. He glanced darkly at the pile of mud. “Ought to haul that gom away before it driddles back into the well. It’s onhealthy.”

  I told of finding a host of clay figures at the white mud deposit on Laurel. Children had created images of man and beast and left them to dry in the sun. The figures had great ears and hollow eye sockets, nostrils flared and mouths open. One example of statuary was uncommonly imaginative: six grotesque heads were stacked head on head, totem-fashion. And though I didn’t relate it to Mr. Maggers, I had glimpsed the statuette of a woman lying on a Rapps Creek doorstep, formed with startling anatomical precision. It lay fresh-made, damp and yellow. The man of the house had come out to quiet the dogs as I entered the yard and also discovered the mud figure. His jaws had flushed. He flung his hat over it, mumbling angrily, “I’ll wring that young ’uns neck.” Mr. Maggers grunted. “Not a wonder chaps get wormy, playing in filth.” He went behind the well-box. He returned wearing dry clothes, the wet garments wrung and folded, pondering my revelation. I could see a sermon rising in him, the way his hands lifted, palms open, the folded breeches raised in hand like the Book. As Letch Jackson once said of a certain commonwealth’s attorney, you could see the worms of thought behind his eyes. “In old times,” Mr. Maggers preached, “they was a heathen, and his name was Aaron, and he set him up some images.” His arms fell, his voice lowered. “And he come on evil days.”

  The customary well-cleaning fee was one dollar. Mr. Maggers accompanied me into the house to get his pay, and to see the typewriter. He clenched the bill into a fist, the green ends sticking out, and did not pocket it. He watched the machine uncovered, the paper rolled onto the platen, the specimen lines typed—“The sly brown fox jumped over the slippery log.” His gaze was as intent as the sow-cat’s when she fancied to leap upon the table and sit beside the clicking mechanism, bowing her head when the carriage passed over, whiskers flicking at the bell’s tap, and thrusting a paw at a key as if to snag a mouse.

  “I’ve seen typewriters in plenty,” Mr. Maggers explained, “but they were ever sitting aside, like a play-pretty.” He recalled the first, thirty-odd years past in a lawyer’s office at Stone Eagle, Old Virginia. It had rested under a glass bell. “I thought to myself, that trick must be tender, kept beneath glass like a pound of butter.”

  I typed his name, the letters in capitals, underscored, trailed by an asterisk:

  MR. THOMAS LANCE MAGGERS*

  “That’s me,” he beamed. He hummed enviously. “If I could work a trick like that I’d write a sight of letters—I’d write letters to the nation. Bet you’ve blacked many a page.” Yet when I urged him to write his own name he shook his head. “Ah, no,” he said, “I might sprain the box.” He questioned, “Ever do a job of writing for other people?” And he lifted his fist, holding up the money I had paid him. “I’ve got a dollar’s worth of letters I want wrote.”

  “This will make us square and even on the well-cleaning,” I said. “You keep the dollar.”

  He pocketed the bill. His face sobered and his eyes cut back against the wall. He said, “I want letters writ to the head policeman of every city of north United States.”

  I typed his message to the police chief of New York City, he dictating at my elbow: “I want to know if my boy, Jasper Maggers, is in your jailhouse, and if he is I want to know. I don’t aim to try bailing him out, for I wouldn’t bail him out of hell if his shirttail was on fire. I just want to know where he is, and I’ll be mightily obliged if you’ll write to me and say if you’ve got him. I’m his daddy, asking.” I made copies of the message and directed them to the chiefs-of-police of Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago.

  His voice had husked as he spoke. Tears welled in his eyes and beaded his cheeks. He dabbed at them angrily. “The plagued hay fever,” he said. “I’m hay suffering.”

  I Love My Rooster

  We lived in Houndshell mine camp the year of the coal boom, and I remember the mines worked three shifts a day. The conveyors barely ceased their rusty groaning for five months. I recollect the plenty there was, and the silver dollars rattling wherever men walked; and I recollect the goldfinches stayed that winter through, their yellow breasts turning mole-gray.

  We were eating supper on a November evening when Sim Brannon, the foreman, came to tell Father of the boom. Word came that sudden. Father talked alone with Sim in the front room, coming back to the kitchen after a spell. A chuckle of joy broke in his throat as he sat down at the table again, swinging the baby off the floor onto his knee. He reached for the bowl of shucky beans, shaping a hill of them on his plate with a spoon. Never had he let us play with victuals. “They’ve tuk the peg off o’ coal,” he said. “Government’s pulled the price tag. Coal will be selling hand over fist.”

  The baby stuck a finger into the bean mound. Father didn’t scold. Mother lifted the coffeepot, shaking the spout clear of grounds. “I never heard tell it had a peg,” she said.

  Fern and Lark and I looked at Father, wondering what a coal peg was. The baby’s face was bright and wise, as if he knew.

  Father thumped the table, marking his words. “I say it’s ontelling what a ton o’ coal will sell for. They’s a lack afar north at the big lakes and in countries across the waters. I figure the price will double or treble.” He lifted a hand over the baby’s head. “Yon blue sky might be the limit.”

  Our heads turned toward the window. We saw only the night sky, dark as gob smoke.

  Mother set the coffeepot down, for it began to tremble in her hand. She thrust a stick of wood into the stove, though supper was done and the room warm. “Will there be plenty in the camps?” she asked, uncertain.

  Father laughed, spoon in air. “Best times ever hit this country,” he said, jarring the table. “Why, I’m a-liable to draw twice the pay I get now.” He paused, staring at us. We sat as under a charm, listening. “We’re going to feed these chaps till they’re fat as mud,” he went on. “Going to put proper clothes on their backs and buy them a few pretties. We’ll live like folks were born to live. This hardscrabble skimping I’m tired of. We’re going to fare well.”

  The baby made a cluck with his tongue, trying to talk. He squeezed a handful of beans until they popped between his fingers.

  “For one thing,” Father said, “I’m going to buy me a pair o’ high-top boots. These clodhoppers I’m wearing have wore a half acre o’ bark off my heels.”

  The cracked lids of the stove began to wink. Heat grew in the room.

  “I want me a fact’ry dress,” Fern spoke.

  “I need me a shirt,” I said. “A boughten shirt. And I want a game rooster. One that’ll stand on my shoulder and crow.”

  Father glanced at me, suddenly angry.

  “Me,” Lark began, “I want—” But he could not think what he wanted most of all.

  “A game rooster!” Father exclaimed. “They’s too many gamble cocks in this camp already. Why, I’d a’ soon buy you a pair o’ dice and a card deck. I’d a’ soon.”

  “A pet rooster wouldn’t harm a hair,” I said, the words small and stubborn in my throat. And I thought of one-eyed Fedder Mott, who oft played mumbly- peg with me, and who went to the rooster matches at the Hack. Fedder would tell of the fights, his eye patch shaking, and I would wonder what there was behind the patch. I’d always longed to spy.

  “No harm, as I see, in a pet chicken,” Mother said.

  “I want me a banty,” Lark said.

  Father grinned, his anger gone. He batted an eye at Mother. “We hain’t going into the fowl business,” he said. “That’s for shore.” He gave the baby a spoonful of beans. “While ago I smelled fish on Sim Brannon—fried salt fish he’d just et for supper. I’m a-mind to buy a whole wooden kit o’ mackerel. We’ll be able.”

  Mother rai
sed the window a grain, yet it seemed no less hot. She sat down at the foot of the table. The baby jumped on Father’s knee, reaching arms toward her. His lips rounded, quivering to speak. A bird sound came out of his mouth.

  “I bet he wants a pretty-piece bought for him,” Fern said.

  “By juckers,” Father said, “if they was a trinket would larn him to talk, I’d buy it.” He balanced the baby in the palm of a hand and held him straight out, showing his strength. Then he keened his eyes at Mother. “You hain’t said what you want. All’s had their say except you.”

  Mother stared into her plate. She studied the wedge print there. She did not lift her eyes.

  “Come riddle, come riddle,” Father said impatiently.

  “The thing I want hain’t a sudden idea,” Mother said quietly. Her voice seemed to come from a long way off. “My notion has followed me through all the coal camps we’ve lived in, a season here, a span there, forever moving. Allus I’ve aimed to have a house built on the acres we heired on Shoal Creek o’ Troublesome. Fifteen square acres we’d have to raise our chaps proper. Garden patches to grow victuals. Elbowroom a-plenty. Fair times and bad, we’d have a roof-tree. Now, could we save half you make, we’d have enough money in time.”

  “Half?” Father questioned. “Why, we’re going to start living like folks. Fittin clothes on our backs, food a body can enjoy.” He shucked his coat, for he sat nearest the stove. He wiped sweat beads off his forehead.

  “I need me a shirt,” I said. “A store-bought shirt.” More than a game rooster, more than anything, I wanted a shirt made like a man’s. Being eight years old, I was ashamed to wear the ones Mother sewed without tails to stuff inside my breeches.

  “No use living bare-bones in the midst o’ plenty,” Father said. “Half is too much.”