Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

by Mark Zwonitzer

  And maybe best of all, the new Maces Springs home was an easy walk to Neal’s; it was nothing to run over to the store to trade milk and eggs. Leonard Neal, who took over for old John, wouldn’t just buy the eggs, he’d buy the chicken, too, or most anything else a body had to sell. Ermine Carter and his wife, Ora, used to pick huckleberries to trade for fabric, to make their children’s school clothes. Leonard Neal stocked sturdy fabrics for making dresses and pants, flat bread (didn’t have to have corn bread with every meal), and Cracker Jacks for the children. Into the twenties, that store remained the only place in Maces Springs to spend hard cash, and the single bustling spot in town. To get there, Pleasant and Sara came down off the mountain and walked half a mile along the rutted dirt road that ran to the north and west through the Valley. They’d cut up onto the track bed and across the iron tracks themselves, then down onto the gravel holding area that fronted the store’s uncovered wooden porch. On the way in, they’d nod greetings to whomever they knew, and if it was Pleasant, to those he didn’t. People were always milling around that porch, especially when the flag was out and the train was going to stop.

  Neal’s was officially the railroad depot, the post office, and the general store; unofficially it was meeting place, town square, card room, and gossip corner all rolled into one. It was big enough to hold a crowd—thirty feet wide and a hundred feet deep, with a sturdy wood tongue-and-groove floor, and a big potbellied stove with a table and chairs next to it where people could sit for coffee and cards, or to listen to the radio. If there was a Jack Dempsey title fight, Leonard Neal would dial it in on his battery-powered radio, and the store would crowd up with men, while the women shook their heads, wondering what could be so desperately important about “a wrasslin’ match.”

  That store was most notable for the people it brought together. At any given time it might hold the richest landowner in the Valley and the most low-down tenant farmer; a traveling salesman (a “drummer,” they’d call him) in a city-sharp serge suit who got his car stuck on the muddy roads outside, and the local boys in their overalls who made half a living by waiting for chances to lift those kinds of cars out of the mud for a dime; a college man in Sunday clothes come to town to run the Maces Springs primary school, or a backwoods boy from way up in the hollows above Boozy Creek who rode over the mountain on horseback to catch the next morning’s train to Gate City to fetch a doctor to look in on his daddy. He might be telling anybody who’d listen how he’d never bring his coon dog over to Neal’s again. He’d rode over with the dog one time, and that was enough. When that hound heard the train awhistlin’ down the Valley, he hit that mountain and didn’t come down for what seemed like a week.

  More than anything, Neal’s, like Poor Valley itself, was a way station—and a place so plunked down in the middle that it was the perfect vantage point to see old hat and newfangled, farm and city, past and future. Talk at Neal’s wasn’t confined to the Valley; there was plenty of talk about the world beyond. Local boys were starting to leave to find work elsewhere. Up in Wise County, the coal mines at Norton, Coeburn, and Appalachia were always hunting skilled carpenters and unskilled laborers. And they always needed men farther over in the big Pocahantas field in Tazewell County, and across the state line in Bluefield, West Virginia. A man didn’t need anything but a strong back to get on a crew setting mining timbers, laying underground rails, or pulling coal cars by hand. The work could bust a man, and there were stories of coal leaders who drove their crew day and night and day again—thirty-six hours straight—letting up only for meals; and of foremen beating men with pick handles. But it paid better than a dollar a day; word was out on that. The idea was that a man could work in the mines a while, scrape together enough money to buy some land, and come back home. How could they know, sitting there in the sweet breeze of Poor Valley, that there were mine muckers who worked full-time and came out of the week in debt after they’d paid their rent and store bill to the company?

  There were easier wage opportunities around now, too. Over in Bristol there was a pulp and paper factory, a leather goods factory, and a foundry for making mine cars. There were textile mills as near as Galax and Fries, and just a dozen miles away in Kingsport, Tennessee, jobs were going begging. Kingsport, especially, was coming up in the world. First known as the Boat Yard, Kingsport had long been a sleepy river town of a thousand souls where they built boats to haul staples such as bacon, salt, and nails up either fork of the Holston. But when the Clinchfield Railroad connected the city to Cincinnati and the Carolina coast in 1909, and started promoting the town, Kingsporters began to get the idea their city was on the way up, a Tennessee Zenith. The Kingsport Improvement Association hired a hotshot (aka European-trained) landscape architect and city planner, who laid out streets radiating from a town circle that was ringed with high-steepled brick churches. Then the Improvement Association bought up the big tracts in the flatlands near the fork of the Holston River, put in a power plant, and started selling the town to industrialists and investors. By 1919 they’d drummed up a cement plant, a tannery, a book manufacturer (they’d print the classics!), and a brick and tile factory.

  Then they hooked the Big Fish. The self-appointed town fathers invited photography tycoon George Eastman to have a look-see at their new power plant and a nearby methanol factory. They took him pheasant hunting in the mountains overlooking the river bottoms, and made sure he came back with a couple of birds. But it wasn’t just natural beauty and rich virgin timberland that attracted Eastman. The way he saw it, the town was blessedly free of the dark-skinned Mediterranean immigrants he blamed for the labor trouble in mills and factories in the Northeast. “Kingsport is . . . in a beautiful valley at 1800 ft. elevation,” Eastman wrote later. “One of the nicest towns I have ever seen, with 10,000 inhabitants, only one of which is a foreigner.” The locals, Eastman knew, would also work for a lot less than the urbanites of the North. Eastman shelled out a million dollars for the government-owned wood-alcohol factory, bought an extra three hundred acres, put in a narrow-gauge railroad to haul timber to his plant, and began mass-producing his own wood alcohol to be used in Eastman Kodak film base.

  But even after Tennessee Eastman was up and running, the Improvement Association still had some good land left over in the bottoms, and some of that land ended up in the hands of Uncle Charlie Bays. Charlie was Mollie Carter’s younger brother. He’d married a local girl named Mary Smith, and by 1918 they were living in her family homeplace, a big two-story clapboard house right up the road from Neal’s. By the standards of the Valley, they were living high. The house was surrounded by fruit trees and a whitewashed picket fence; it had five fireplaces.

  Charlie had a big farm in the Valley, but he had to feed three big sons—Dewey, Coy, and Stanley—and also his four daughters, Elva, Alma, Charmie, and Stella. Charlie had been around enough to know there were easier places than Poor Valley to claw a living from the ground. “Daddy was like a Viking,” Stella remembers, “always looking for better land.” In 1919 he bought a sixty-acre farm on a fertile four-mile stretch of bottomland in a long fork of the South Holston River. The cabin they built wasn’t nearly as big as their house in the Valley, but it was so near the paper mill that they could hook in to its power plant. When Fland took five-year-old Vernon over to visit a few years later, the boy couldn’t stop looking at the electric lights. He’d never seen anything so bright. And if Vernon would always remember the first sharp glare of those arc lights, his uncle Charlie’s own children would be forever changed by living in the brilliance of that city light. Sometimes A.P. would stop by Kingsport for a visit; and he had to take but one look at his young cousins to know they were on their way up.

  In the twenties there were more and more ways up and out of the Valley. And if you got far enough out, the roads were flat-graded and paved, made for fast travel. Nobody in Maces Springs knew that better than A.P.’s brother Ezra “Eck” Carter, who was by the early twenties a man on the go. When he was in town, people would
see Eck at Neal’s sometimes, and they’d watch him walk. He swayed a bit, holding his hands out from his hips as though he were trying to balance himself. This odd gait was, in fact, a sign of professional attainment. Just like he’d vowed, Eck had got that job as a U.S. Mail clerk on the rails. He’d ride the train from Bristol as far up the line as Washington, D.C., and he spent so much time walking the aisles of rocking passenger cars, he always looked uneasy on still ground. Eck’s work made him known in Poor Valley, and respected as well. He had the best job in the Valley, that’s what everybody said. For one thing, he was the best-paid man in Maces Springs, salaried, in fact, with all the guarantees and pensions Uncle Sam had to offer. But it wasn’t just his walking-around money that distinguished Eck. He was the first of the Carter boys—and one of the few men in all Poor Valley—to make his living by his wits. And Eck let it be known, you had to be a sharp tool to do his job, had to memorize every post-office code in Virginia and the surrounding states, know the connecting lines to one-horse towns all over the South, and be able to speed-sort by hand, and on the move, sackfuls of incoming mail.

  Above all, Eck was a proud man, and he wasn’t above the subtle promotion of his reputation. He didn’t have to do much, the way people were watching him. They’d see him return to the Valley from his trips north with the spoils of his success: a radio, a phonograph with a rack of hand-heavy but sleek black 78 records in their paper slipcovers, and books. Most folks in the Valley were lucky to have a Bible and a speller. Eck was always reading about practicalities that hadn’t made it to the Valley: rotary engines, electric motors, dynamos, alternate and direct currents, and combustible engines. He was the first in the Valley to have a car. Eck’s first—a Model A Ford—didn’t make much time, but he liked to push it to the limit, with a seat full of friends, and people hanging off the running board. “They were just little ole cars, on dirt roads. If it rained, they’d just slide right off the road,” says sister-in-law Theda Carter. “But back then, a small bunch of men could practically pick it up and put it back on the road.”

  It wasn’t until the thirties that the state started grading and tending the dirt road that ran down Poor Valley, alongside the railroad tracks, but by then Eck had perfected his foul-weather driving methods. One of Flanders Bays’s children would look up and see Eck pull off the road at a railroad crossing and hop onto the tracks. (Eck had the train schedules memorized, too.) The only problem was his wheelbase never matched the track gauge, so he wasn’t so much riding the track as riding the ties. “He was always bumping up and down as he went by our house,” Vernon Bays says. “He did that for about a quarter of a mile to the next crossing.”

  * * *

  If Pleasant Carter was jealous of his dashing younger brother with his automobile and his pockets full of crisp dollar bills, he never expressed it. But what he saw happening all around him made it harder and harder for him to see himself as a lifelong dirt farmer. A.P.’s wandering gene was always getting the better of him. If his feet weren’t wandering, his mind was. In the growing season, Pleasant (or “Doc,” as he was often called by now) was especially restless. He’d get his crops planted every year, but then it would be months before he’d see the corn ripen or the tobacco leaf out. And those crops had to be worried over constantly, almost daily. The corn patches had to be weeded and reweeded; the tobacco plants had to be wormed and suckered. The constant press of tending, and the waiting, waiting, waiting, drove him nuts. And for what? Where was the money in that? So Pleasant started to avail himself of the other employment opportunities in the area. He worked at cutting timber, tanning bark, and framing tobacco barns. Just six miles up the rails, he got work for a company digging silicose sand out of the mountain for making glass. They actually made a town there, Silica, with a mail drop and a railroad depot for the freights hauling out the sand. “Daddy worked there beating rocks,” says Joe Carter. “They’d go in there and shoot dynamite, blast it out. And then Daddy and them would take a hammer and break up the rocks until they could handle the pieces, put it in a cable car down off the mountain, where they’d put it in a big crusher and pulverize it into sand.”

  The jobs A.P. liked best were working sawmills and selling fruit trees. There were men who couldn’t abide the whirring din of the rotary blade on hardwood, but Pleasant Carter could stand for hours listening for the changes in pitch and tune, the knothole melodies. That whir drowned out the rest of the world, so it was just him and his thoughts alone, as he smoothed raw wood into clean building lumber. He liked the tree selling because he liked the travel. In the winter months especially, he’d take off on foot, carrying his shoulder bag and his catalogs all over Scott County and beyond. In time, he was making ever-widening loops. He’d walk up through the Valley, following the Appalachian Trail all the way to Tazewell and even into Bland County, making acquaintances all the way, living by country hospitality. “Just hang around,” people would say. “We’ll wring a chicken’s neck.” He liked it best when he could stay with people who made a little music on their porch of an evening, after supper. A lot of times he carried his own fiddle with him, in a flour sack.

  On the way home he’d circle back around through the hollows and coves, the little towns and mining camps of Buchanan County or Russell or Wise. And maybe he’d stop off in the big city of Kingsport, or Bristol, see what was new in the stores. He was especially interested in Cecil McLister’s new place on State Street in Bristol, where you could buy the black vinyl disks that played music. Sometimes Cecil would wheel a phonograph over by the front door and pipe music right out onto State Street. People would gather on the sidewalks by the dozens to listen. Sometimes the local police had to send a man over to break up the crowd, or at least clear a path on the sidewalk. By the time A.P. got back home, he might have walked 150 miles of muddy wagon roads and mountain paths, might have even sold a few trees. But he always made new friends. And like Bob Carter, he had a little news of the outside world.

  A.P. might be gone a week or ten days at a time, and he was a family man now. In 1919 Sara gave birth to Gladys Ettaleen Carter. A.P. was so nervous when Sara announced she was going into labor that he walked eight miles to Mendota, in the middle of the night, to get Doc Meade. Doc Meade probably would have suggested Poor Valley’s best midwife. “Get Mollie Carter,” he’d say. “She’ll do as good as I would.” Of course, by the time A.P. got back, Mollie Carter had delivered the baby without complication. His second daughter, Janette, was born in 1923, and he was away again, though nobody remembers exactly where.

  Not that Pleasant was a great deal of help when he was home. As his daughter Janette wrote in her book, Living with Memories, “He would start jobs, go on to another, and not finish what he started. Mother spent her time telling him, ‘Doc, change clothes.’ ‘Pick up your tools.’ When Daddy finished a job, he never cleaned up; someone else did, while he just calmly walked off! He’d start something, then walk off till he took a notion to come back and finish what he’d started. It might be a month later.”

  More than anything, A.P. Carter’s ways gave his home a restlessness; when he was around, the entire family lived in a state of constant readiness, as if they were on their way somewhere, frozen in that unsteady moment of excitement and fear that comes when the suitcases are packed but the conveyance hasn’t yet arrived. It seemed as though A.P. was constantly looking for a way to confirm Mollie’s prophecy of his being marked. “Someday, Sary,” he once said, “my name’s gonna mean something.”

  “Daddy would walk and walk and walk,” Janette says. “He always seemed to be in deepest study. And he’d walk like that up and down the railroad tracks, always with his hands behind his back, in deep study. He was a-searchin’.”

  * * *

  It was up to Sara to steady the household, and Sara Dougherty Carter was a woman meant for the task. She was prideful, and like Mollie Carter, she measured herself by work. “I knowed her for taking a horse and dragging mining ties and everything else out of the mountain, run a g
rist mill, jack of all trades,” says an old neighbor, Clyde Gardner. “I took corn out there for her to grind the day before [her third child] Joe was born. Somebody else started the engine, but she had it ground. And Joe was born that night.” Sara’s house had to be neat, her sheets white as snow, and her goose-feather pillows round and plump. “I know she believed in feeding her kids, but it was more’n that,” Joe Carter says. “She had to have a vegetable salad with vinegar-and-oil dressing. And she would fix up vinegar and oil and add just this much sugar. She had a taste just like she had an ear for a song. She’d taste it, ‘Needs a touch more vinegar.’ And it was perfect every time. Every time the same. She could throw a meal together easiest of anybody there ever was. She’d grab this and that. Next thing you know she had a meal together. Not a lot of pains.”

  The idea was nobody should see her struggle. But anybody could see it in her hands. They were made strong from years of washing on a board, sometimes blistered from the frying grease popping out of the skillet where she cooked every meal, often dirty under the nails after a day of weeding a corn patch, or calloused from hours of keeping up her end of the crosscut saw. And Sara and A.P. had so little in the beginning, says one niece, Sara sometimes had only one dress that she’d turn over when it got too dirty. That had to be the hardest for Sara, because she was proud in one way Mollie Carter never was. She wanted to look good, all the time. Sara really did take the wild mountain flowers and twine them ’midst her ringlets and waves of dark hair; every day she used the little glass perfume dispenser on her dresser. It wasn’t that she wanted to go out in the world and talk with people, or be talked about, but to look right confirmed her own sense of who she ought to be.

  In fact, Sara might have kept pretty much to herself and her family, but in Poor Valley women still depended on one another. What would Sara have done without Dicey Thomas? In the summer of 1923, Sara was taking Gladys and six-week-old Janette back from Ma Carter’s house when a train spooked the horse pulling their buggy. Janette was thrown clear into Dicey’s rosebush, but Sara tried to hold the reins, and she was dragged down the rocky dirt road. Sara didn’t get out of bed for nearly six weeks, but Dicey—who had seven children of her own—plucked Janette from the rosebush and nursed her the whole time. And that wasn’t uncommon. Dicey, or Sara’s sisters-in-law, Vangie Carter and Ora Carter, they’d all scoot over one of their own to nurse a niece, a nephew, or a neighbor baby.