Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

by Mark Zwonitzer

  In Hiltons, James P. Curtis was doing a fine trade in both guns and butter. He’d invented a churn that ran by the motion of a rocking chair, and a more efficient turn plow for the hundreds of dirt farmers scratching a living off of the land. But he is remembered best for his rifles. During the Civil War, Curtis had supplied nearly a thousand Kentucky rifles to the Confederate army. At the turn of the century, his long-shot rifles were still in wide use in the land disputes that had entered the American consciousness as “feuds.”

  More than anything else in Scott County, land counted. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, nearly four-fifths of Scott County’s seventeen thousand residents farmed. Even at $2.26 an acre, no commodity was more precious than land. And it wasn’t just the present value of the land that mattered, but the future value. In fact, the fastest growing trades in the county—as in most of Appalachia—were land agentry and lawyering. And most of the men practicing these professions were under the employ of the railroads and their subsidiaries, out on the prowl, quietly leasing mineral or timber rights from local farmers. “Inexhaustible beds of iron ore (red and brown hematite) are found in this county,” boasted a local business directory in 1889, “and manganese, lead, coal, marble of various kinds, and limestone in abundance. . . . The extension of the Narrow-Gauge road through this county from Bristol in Tennessee, will open up its mineral treasures, which now lie buried awaiting convenient and cheap transportation facilities.”

  Already, in 1891, the railroads and their affiliates were clear-cutting tens of thousands of acres of forest for crossties and square-set mining timbers. Five separate mines were in full cry, blasting coal and iron out of the ground, filling up freight cars behind the gleaming new Norfolk & Western or Virginia & Southwestern engines, all headed for the more populated and higher-paying parts of America. The railroads were not a paternal force in the valleys, not by a long shot. Neither were the timber companies or the mine owners or the quarry operators. They meant to dig out of the land whatever value it held, and Scott Countians take the hindmost. By 1891, for better or worse, the future had rumbled into the valleys.

  * * *

  From her little one-room log cabin on the other side of Pine Ridge, Mollie Bays Carter couldn’t hear the Virginia & Southwestern engines roll through Poor Valley. Not that she didn’t have her ears open to them. It was the middle of the night and she was by the fire, still in her day clothes, sitting bolt upright on a cane-backed chair. On her lap she held a shotgun.

  Mollie was just nineteen and she still held her beauty, which owed in no small part to the Cherokee in her. Her great-grandfather was a half-blood, and you could see it in Mollie’s high cheekbones, her dark eyes, and her straight coal-black hair. She kept her hair long (“A woman’s hair is her glory,” they taught her at the Friendly Grove Methodist Church). When she let it down, it would fall well below her narrow waist. But Mollie rarely let her hair down. She plaited it every day and kept it tied in a fat bun on top of her tiny head. Above all, Mollie was a Christian woman and modest in her appearance.

  In the cabin that night, she was alone except for her infant son, Alvin Pleasant Delaney Carter, who was born just weeks before, on December 15, 1891. That’s why she was up in the middle of the night. Earlier that day, Mollie had spied a panther skulking around the farm. There was no glass in the windows of her cabin; she’d just hung sackcloth over them. That might keep out the wind, but it wasn’t going to keep out a hungry panther. So Mollie sat alert and awake all night long, in frightened defense of her newborn son.

  Where her husband, Bob, was she couldn’t have said for sure. Robert Carter was part of a long line of roaming mountain men, from Daniel Boone (who had been so constitutionally unsettled that he had, at age eighty, still searched out new trails) to the novelist Thomas Wolfe (who would occasionally, and without purpose, walk the entire circumference of Manhattan Island). Bob Carter was a far-wanderer, a gangly, long-legged man, and, truth be told, a bit flaky. He never was much for work, and there were times when Mollie would look up and Bob was just plain gone. No telling where . . . or for how long.

  One thing he liked to do was visit the sick. Bob could sit bedside for hours, praying over the afflicted. If somebody in the Valley was dying of cancer, neighbors might help plant the corn or bring in the harvest, but most made a point to stay well outside the plagued house, reckoning any sickness could be catching. Not Robert Carter. Later, during the big influenza epidemic of 1917, he was so stalwart and so fearless that he would earn the nickname “Flu-proof Bob.” Another thing Bob liked to do was inquire about local happenings. He was an enthusiastic gatherer of news; some said gossip. One neighbor lady who was a bit peeved by some of Bob’s more personal reporting took to calling him by the local newspaper name. (“Well, here comes the Scott Banner,” she’d say, loud enough for him to hear as he approached. “He’s got all the news.”) But Bob never let the taunts slow him down. Comfort and news were Bob Carter’s business, and that business kept him on the move. Later in the marriage, Mollie learned to read the signs. When Bob began chopping wood and stacking it high, she knew he was about to leave. The higher the stack, the longer he’d be gone.

  “Bob, are you leaving your family again?” a neighbor once admonished.

  “Well, if you can take any better care of them than I can,” he shot back, “go on ahead.”

  “Uncle Bob would be walking by our homeplace and say, ‘Well, where’s your dad?’ ” his nephew Vernon Bays remembers. “He would ask a dozen questions: ‘When did he leave?’ ‘When’s he gonna be back?’ ‘What’d he go there for?’ and he never stopped walking. Just walking and asking questions and bringing news.”

  Bob might be gone from home a day, or—say, he went to visit his cousin Amanda Groves—he might be gone a week. Mandy Groves was a striking woman, six feet tall and broad-shouldered, with flaming red hair she kept pulled back so it didn’t fly into an unruly frizz. Mandy was nosy, too, and witchlike. She never forgot anything. She could give chapter and verse on what happened on a specific day forty years before. Neighbors who had no record of their birth date would go to see Mandy, and she’d know. You were born July 6, thirty-eight years ago. That’s the day they brought the wheat in over at Wolfe’s. Looked like a storm all day, but never did rain. Well, there was nothing Mandy didn’t know, and Bob could put his feet under her table and get all the goings-on. Besides, over by Mandy there was always some land squabble. Her own husband, Abraham, once plugged Jerry McMurray with a bullet from the silver-plated rifle Old Man Curtis had made for him. So there was plenty of interest at Mandy’s house.

  In later years, when Bob was on the circuit, Mollie might be able to track him by telephone. There were only a few phones in Poor Valley, or over in Little Poor Valley, but somebody would have seen him, and they’d tell him to get on home, that Mollie said it was time to strip the tobacco. But way back in 1891, on that cold, dark night, Mollie Bays Carter had no way of knowing precisely where her new husband was. Maybe Bob had walked down the Little Valley to Hiltons, and then another half dozen miles along the Appalachian Trail to the county seat, where he could alert the sheriff of the “addition to the family” and record the birth of his new son, Alvin Pleasant Carter, in the Scott County registrar’s books. Or maybe he was off to visit an uncle, see about work. It was hard to know.

  From the beginning, Mollie Bays knew Bob Carter was going to be a project. She’d first seen him about 1888, not long after her family moved across Clinch Mountain and into Poor Valley so that they could be nearer the new railroad. She’d gone to a square dance, where she’d seen Bob playing the fiddle. And not only could he fiddle, but he could hit the back-step, too. He was more than six feet tall, fair-skinned, strong-jawed, and only a bit sunken in the chest. His hair was wavy and brown, shading to auburn. Whenever Mollie told the story of their meeting, she’d talk about watching him on the dance floor with his patent-leather lace-up boots with the blue bands around the tops and his “stri-ped britches.” She a
lways said he was the prettiest thing she’d ever seen and that she fell in love with him the minute she saw him.

  But there were things about Robert Carter that could have given her pause. Bob had seen some of the world already, having just returned from a railroad job in Richmond, Indiana. And Mollie had pretty good reason to believe that Bob Carter had seen the business end of a whiskey bottle as well. (“Most Carters of that generation,” says a family historian, “didn’t hesitate to take a good sip of whiskey.”) There was also the thorny question of his provenance. His Little Valley neighbors all said Bob was “base-born,” a phrase, like many in the region, meant to muddy the actual meaning, a way of talking about things that kept outsiders in the dark. There were other such phrasings: If a man was “in his back,” he was, in fact, drunk as a skunk; if in wartime he had gone “scoutin’,” he was, in fact, hiding up on the mountain, dodging conscription. So the locals might have called him base-born, but to put it in the plain English of the day, Bob Carter was somebody’s bastard son.

  Bob’s grandfather had been the first Carter to come over to the south side of Clinch Mountain. Dulaney Carter was the son of a well-off landowner from Rye Cove, twenty miles northwest of Poor Valley, and a descendant of one of the earliest and most esteemed settlers in Scott County. He had also married well. His bride, Rebecca Smith, was the daughter of John “Dutch” Smith, who’d got a land grant for exemplary service in the Revolutionary War. So when Dulaney arrived in Poor Valley in 1833, he was doubly staked, which was why when they spoke of him, his own children would say that Dulaney had managed to drink up two fortunes. “The bottle,” says his great-grandson, “got the better of him. He had nothing when he died, and he left his children with nothing.”

  Dulaney’s second child, Nancy Carter, had it particularly rough. She was a big-boned woman, with a streak of independence as wide as the Delaware and a weakness for pipe smoking and men. At twenty, she’d married a teenager named William Anderson Bays. They had four children together before he went off to fight for the Confederacy in the War Between the States. Billy Bays didn’t return from the war for nearly a full year after Lee’s surrender, and when he did come back, his wife was pregnant again. Now, Billy was no scholar, but he could do the math. He’d been gone years. On March 20, 1866, Nancy had a son, Robert, to whom she gave her maiden name. She filed for and was granted a divorce from Billy Bays, who moved to the next county and started a new family. Several years later, Nancy Carter bore another son, named Elisha “Lish” Carter. There was much speculation about the paternity of these boys. For her own part, Nancy took a put-that-in-your-pipe-and-smoke-it stance. Somebody once asked her directly who was the father of one of her children, and she replied, directly, “Law, honey, when you run through a briar patch, you don’t know which one scratched you.”

  Bob grew up mainly with Nancy’s brother, William Carter, who had five strapping children of his own (including the witchlike Mandy). But in the years after the war, working bodies were always welcome. There was almost no hard cash in the Valley at that time—save Confederate currency, which had all the value of a two-legged mule. People lived off the land, raising table vegetables in a truck patch, hogs for meat, and corn and tobacco for bartering for other necessities. Over time, William Carter finagled his way into enough estate sales and land deals to build up a holding of nearly a thousand acres. On his death, each of his five surviving children got two hundred acres of land. Neither Bob nor Lish was written into his uncle’s will.

  In fact, when Robert Carter convinced Mollie Bays to marry him in 1889, he was a twenty-three-year-old farmer with next to no land, little ambition, no inclination toward hard work, no professed faith in God, and a passing acquaintance with the bottle. He was high-strung, and hardheaded to boot. It’s a good thing he was fetching. And it’s a good thing that Mollie Bays, at seventeen, had faith enough for the both of them. She was going to set him straight.

  Mollie Bays was a God-fearing and abstemious young woman, but she was no stranger to odd men and scandalous women. Her grandfather William H. Bays was one of the most eccentric men on either side of Clinch Mountain. William H. Bays’s father was heir to an early settler and well-off landowner in Scott County; his mother was said to be a full-blooded Cherokee. And this Bays never ran from either heritage. He had his father’s blue eyes but his mother’s jet-black hair, which he parted down the middle (he carried separate combs for each side) and wore in long plaits that fell over his shoulders. He carried his fiddle everywhere and was best known as “Fiddlin’ Billy” or simply “the Entertainer.” It wasn’t just his music that made Fiddlin’ Billy entertaining; he was born to perform, and he meant to amaze. He favored clothes that made a statement, such as long coats made of the finest and most colorful broadcloth, festooned with oversize brass buttons. Fiddlin’ Billy’s son said his father had a way of just appearing, almost out of thin air, then disappearing just as abruptly. And the Entertainer liked you to know that he might trust in God, but he didn’t trust in banks or governments. He never had a nickel in a bank, but he never lacked for money. If there was something he wanted to buy, he’d disappear, and reappear hours later with a wad of greenbacks. It was said that Fiddlin’ Billy had his money buried on some remote and thick-grown hillside, but he died without revealing to his own sons the whereabouts of his stash. If his family knew little of his finances, the local, state, and federal tax authorities knew even less. He was so stubborn about paying his taxes that one frustrated county collector finally reached across and ripped off a handful of Billy’s brass buttons as payment in kind.

  Fiddlin’ Billy’s wife was his equal. Eliza Morgan Bays would race her stud horse alongside Moccasin Creek, bareback . . . and she didn’t ride sidesaddle, and she didn’t always ride sober. When a group of marauders came across the Tennessee border to prey on the women, children, and old men left behind during the Civil War, Eliza—it was believed—was one of the women who tracked the nine men to their camp one night and bludgeoned them to death with hickory sticks. Eliza was evidently a fiercely independent woman, perhaps too independent for Fiddlin’ Billy. In 1870, after twenty-six years of marriage, there was, according to court records, “a devorsement of the parties.” By that time the couple’s eldest daughter had already given birth to four children, all base-born. So Bob Carter’s personal and family history held no terror for Mollie Bays. In fact, there wasn’t much at all that could scare Mollie.

  They were—and are—ferocious doers, the women of Poor Valley, and if they grew up in the long years of want after the Civil War, as Mollie had, they put their faith in God, and in themselves. In those years even the grandest farm in Scott County—the Jett place—operated by the power of man and beast. The scythes were operated by hand, and the turn plows pulled by mule. But what the Valley lacked in machinery, it made up for in women. Women kept the Valley humming. For staying power, efficiency, and capacity, no combustible engine was their equal. The women in the Valley could work all day and all night. Most did so without complaint, save for an occasional sigh (“Law”) or an aside meant for all to hear (“A man’s work is sun to sun; a woman’s work is never done”).

  To make a go of life in the Valley, a woman had to be able to make corn bread, worm tobacco, teach her children Christian prayers, plow a straight row, put up kraut and beans for winter, sew a proper school dress, tan hides, keep a house clean and a cornfield free of weeds. Above all, they had to know how to stretch what life gave them; they wasted nothing.

  Take for instance the hog killing. There are women in the Valley yet who light up at the memory of that splendid tradition. Just put them in the living room and let them talk:

  “It’d take several days to butcher a hog and get everything cut up and put away.”

  “It wasn’t like it is today. I heard somebody say just the other day they threw away the liver! We never threw away a thing. We ate tongue. We’d boil them and peel them off. And the heart. I always liked the heart so good. Some fellow said he didn’t
like to put the head in sausage, so he threw it away. But you could salt that down, and my aunt Rosie could fry that stuff and roll it in buttermilk and flour. Granny made her mincemeat out of the head.”

  “What I like is the cracklin’. Render the lard and cook it down and make cracklin’ bread.”

  “We always fed the ears to the dog.”

  “My grandmother pulled out the intestines and made soap with it.”

  “The bladder? They’d blow that up for a balloon for the kids.”

  “Honey, they used everything but the squeal.”

  Mollie Carter didn’t have an electric icebox, or even a smokehouse, and meat had to keep. So she’d cure it with salt, black pepper, brown sugar, and molasses siphoned from wildwood pines. Even so, there was never enough ham or bacon or sausage to make it more than a side dish. At the heart of the table were the vegetables from the summer garden: kraut and beans Mollie put up to last through the longest winter. If all else ran out, there was always corn bread, and Mollie could always walk out her front door and wring a chicken’s neck.

  The Bob Carters never had enough land to reap cash. Mollie’s dad had deeded them a farm in the Little Valley; it might have been forty acres, but so much of it was wildwood running up into the foothills that there wasn’t room enough for a big corn or tobacco crop. They might have planted a pretty fair orchard on the side of those hills, where, according to the deed, the land “meanders to the top of the Poor Valley knob, thence west with the top of said knob.” But with just Bob and the mules (and even later when his sons came of age), they never had the brute force required to clear the land. So they made do with small harvests, a milk cow, chickens, and a hog a year. Mollie could take milk and eggs through Jett Gap to Neal’s (a general store that also served as the Maces Springs railroad depot and post office) to trade for what else they needed: coffee and sugar, soup beans and rice, fabric for clothes. In the leanest times, John Neal would even let Mollie and her neighbors buy on credit. With so many people in the Valley in the same harness, nobody had more riding on the annual harvest than John Neal. When the family was down to nothing but debt, Bob Carter would have to cut timber and drag it off the mountain by mule to sell to the railroad. The railroad was always in need of timber for ties, and Neal could act as an agent for the transaction and put it right on the train.