“It’s not the devil’s work to build a new church,” I said. My voice was weaker than I hoped it would be.
“It’s the devil’s work to split up a congregation,” the preacher said. “The devil splinters churches all the time.”
“I don’t want to splinter no church,” I said. “I want to build a new church for all of us, on top of the mountain.”
“Oh,” the preacher said. The wind got quieter on the ridge above, but louder in the trees in the pasture below the church. The wind was like a chorus shouting its disapproval at me. Sweat run from my forehead and dampened my temples.
“I want to build a rock church, a bigger church, right on top of the mountain there,” I said. “I want to put the church up high where everybody can see it, and I want a steeple that shoots up into the sky. It’ll have a bell to ring to the farthest coves of the valley, calling everybody to worship.”
“How do you know the Lord is leading you to do this?” Preacher Liner said. He didn’t sound pleased; he sounded irritated.
“I can feel it,” I said. “I had a terrible feeling after the elephant died, and I prayed and the Lord showed me I was to build a new church, for we need a new place of worship.”
“We ain’t got money to build a new church,” the preacher said.
“I will build it myself,” I said. “My grandpa built the first church in these parts, and I will build this one.”
“You can’t build a church all by yourself,” the preacher said.
“I’ll build it with rocks out of the river, and planks from the trees on the hill,” I said. “I will build it one rock and one nail at a time.”
“Beware of the sin of pride,” Preacher Liner said. He didn’t talk at all like I thought he would. Here I was, offering to build a new church with my own hands out of my own materials, on my own land, for his congregation. The least he could do was show a little appreciation. He didn’t like my plan because it wasn’t his idea.
“I want to make something I can take pride in,” I said. “Maybe I’m called to preach in work, and in stone. The church will be my gift to the community.”
“A church is not made with just rocks and mortar,” the preacher said. “A church is in the hearts of people. A church is in the will of the community to come together in fellowship.”
I seen it wouldn’t do any good to argue with the preacher. He didn’t like my idea yet because it was new to him. And he didn’t believe I could build such a church. How could he, since I had never proved myself? I’d failed at or quit everything I’d tried so far. It was up to me to prove I could accomplish something. I didn’t need anybody’s permission to do my work. I just needed the patience and the sense and the time to get the work done.
“There ain’t even water on the mountaintop,” the preacher said.
I told him we could carry water from the spring in buckets, and there was no need to have baptizings on the mountain. But the preacher was quiet for a long time. It was scary for him to just stand there in the dark without saying nothing. Wind roared on the mountain, and I shivered with the sweat under my shirt.
“I won’t let you divide this community with some crazy scheme to build a church,” the preacher said. “All my life I have fought off Pentecostals from breaking up my church, and I won’t let it happen again.”
But I had already made up my mind.
THERE IS A rage that comes on you when you look at woods that need to be cleared. Oak trees and poplar trees stand in the way of the open place you want to make. Trunks hard as masonry have to be chopped through. And stumps have to be dug out of the ground or burned any way you can to get rid of them. A man with an axe looks at the woods all around him and above him and hears the roar of an ocean in his ears and feels the tightening of a fight in his guts. It must be the way our grandfathers felt when they faced the raw wilderness a hundred years ago.
The shadows of the thickets make you mad. The must and mold of the leaf floor rile you. With your two hands and an axe you want to let in the sunlight. You want to chew up the forest and spit it out as mulch. Saplings wave and tremble when you swing against them. Dry leaves and sticks break up when you trample them. The rotten dirt underneath is exposed. Cobwebs and vines need to be tore away and roots tough as gristle ripped from the ground. The ground is laced with secret roots that have to be jerked out like stitches.
When I looked at the trees on the mountain I seen ten thousand licks of the axe that stood in the way of ever starting the church. There was fifty thousand strokes of the saw and a thousand digs with the grubbing hoe. There was bushes and log fires and leveling that stood in the way of my idea.
It was Saturday evening before I got out of the store and come home to work on my plans. As long as I worked for U. G. I could afford to buy tools and supplies a little at a time. But I wouldn’t have time to work except on Saturday afternoons. It would take me weeks to get the mountaintop cleared. It would take me months to dig the foundation and pour the footing. It would take me years to build the church.
I knowed there was no reason to be in a hurry. Yet I felt in a hurry. Better to go slow. Since nobody was supporting me, I would have to go slow. But as the building rose, people would get used to the idea. The preacher would come to approve, and Mama was already enthusiastic. It would take years for people to warm to the idea of the new church, and it would take me years to build it. But when the community saw the beautiful building take shape they would be proud of it.
That first Saturday I chopped down the biggest poplar on the mountaintop. I seen it was better to start with the big timber and clean up the little stuff later. The hardest work should be done first. But as I chopped and watched the yellow poplar fall, and as I slashed limbs and piled laps in a heap right on top of the ridge, I thought how much money I would need just to get started, once I got the trees cleared off. I could borrow Mama’s axe and saw and use our horse, Old Fan. But where would I get a leveler to lay off the foundation? And where would I get the trowel to smooth the footing? I needed new hammers and chisels for shaping rock. I’d need a longer level and try square.
After I got rocks out of the river and out of the creeks, after I heaped them in piles by the streams, I’d still have to build a road up the mountain before hauling them in the wagon to the mountaintop. To make the road I needed a pick and shovel and mattock. I needed a drag pan and turning plow. To pour footing I needed bags of cement and I needed lumber to make a mortar box. I needed a cement hoe, and I needed to haul sand from the bend of the river.
I trimmed limbs off the big log, and then I took the crosscut and sawed the tree into sections before it got dark. Pulling a crosscut saw wears you out in the legs and the back, as well as the arms, for you have to stoop down or squat down to draw it through the log. And when you’re working by yourself you have to push the blade back through the cut, then pull it again. Chopping and sawing is about the hardest work there is. You wonder how the first settlers was able to clear so much woods so fast. I was wore out in an hour.
Nineteen
Ginny
ONE OF THE best ways we had to make a little money was selling molasses. Sorghum was the one crop you could depend on, for no matter how bad the weather was, hot or cool, dry or rainy, cane seemed to thrive along the river. We had always growed cane for ourselves, but it was my husband, Tom, that started planting a whole acre, then two acres, and some years three, and selling syrup by the gallon down at the cotton mill. Tom built the new molasses furnace in the pasture, and every year he sold a hundred dollars’, or sometimes two hundred dollars’, worth of molasses.
Sorghum making is hot and dusty work. You go out in the field and break your back stripping the leaves from the cane. And then you have to cut the stalks and haul them to the mill. Somebody has to feed each stalk into the crushing rollers while the horse walks round and round turning the mill. Then the juice, drawing hundreds of flies and yellow jackets, is carried to the pan over the furnace. The worst job is stirring the pan with th
e skimmer while it boils down. And you have to dip the shiny scum off as you stir. You stand smothering in the smoke and steam, for molasses can’t be cooked a minute too long or they’ll be rubbery and thick. If they’re not cooked enough they’re watery and green.
Every year me and Muir done most of the work. I’d ask Moody to help out, but like as not he’d find an excuse to be gone on the day it was time to strip a field and carry the stalks to the furnace. “Moody, we could use an extra hand,” I said one September morning in 1919 when Moody was seventeen. It was the fall the typhoid come back to the river and fever broke out in houses all down the valley. Hank Richards’s oldest boy was took sick. Typhoid likes hot dry weather, but I figured that if we worked and sweated enough we would sweat out the germs if we got any. Moody had always hated to work with molasses since he was a little boy. It was tedious bone-wearing work.
“Ain’t got time,” Moody snorted.
“The rest of us has got time,” I said.
Muir and me went ahead and done all the stripping and cutting of the acre of early cane. We hauled the stalks to the pasture in the wagon. It was hot as it can get in September. Even though he was still a boy, Muir had split a wagonload of wood for the furnace, and I lit a fire under the big steel pan. Muir hunkered down under the turning shaft of the mill as Old Fan walked around and round. And soon the juice was trickling into the bucket and drawing flies. It would take us at least two days to crush the stalks and boil the sap down to syrup. I figured there was over fifty gallons to be made, and I had to wash out the jugs with hot water and dry them in the sun.
Hard as the work was, it was satisfying too. For boiling the juice was like taking the sweetest extract from the summer, from the soil and sun and rain. The syrup was the pure essence of the harvest, the sugar of the big sorghum grass. The molasses we would store up in the jugs was the very sap and marrow of the grass, concentrated till it was dark and smooth as oil.
“Let me do that,” somebody said. I looked up and seen Moody with his sleeves rolled up.
“Thought you didn’t have time,” I said.
“Give me that skimmer,” Moody said.
If he had decided to work, I wasn’t going to argue with him. His daddy had showed him how to make molasses same as the rest of us. I needed to be carrying jugs out of the smokehouse and scalding them by the springhouse. “Here,” I said, and handed Moody the skimmer.
The three of us strained and sweated all that day, and the next, to make molasses. Moody bent over the smoking pan and skimmed off the dirty foam. He dug a hole in the pasture and poured the scum there. Molasses scum looks both green and purple and shines like it was boiling metal. Moody cussed when he spilled some on the knee of his overalls, but he kept on working. I was so tickled to have his help, tears come to my eyes.
When we finished up, there was seventy-two jugs full of molasses. It wasn’t the best syrup we had made, because Moody was out of practice and let some cook too long so they was thick and strong. But most of the jugs was good and we set them in the smokehouse to cool.
The usual thing was to load twenty or thirty jugs in the wagon and drive down to the cotton mill village. Tom had peddled molasses door-to-door there and made some regular customers among the mill hands. You could also stop the wagon in front of the company store, and people would come by and buy jugs from you. But the fastest way was to go house-to-house. Once you started knocking on doors, women down the street would hear you coming and be ready with seventy-five cents for a gallon of syrup.
Muir and me drove the wagon down to the village two different days. I hated to do it and felt my face get hot when I walked up to a house to knock. But I done it anyway. I done it for the memory of Tom, and I done it to help Muir, who needed the money for his traps and guns and his big plans. A woman has to help out her children if she can.
We sold forty gallons and got thirty dollars, and I give half to Muir. There would be a late cane field to cut in early October, but we would keep that syrup to sell a gallon at a time through the winter. There was two jugs in the wagon we hadn’t sold, and when I carried them back into the smokehouse I glanced at the row of jugs we had left. There should have been thirty-two, including the jugs I brought back. But it looked like there was less. I counted only twenty-six jugs in the gloom. The place smelled of salt and smoke and grease, and the ashes of old fires.
Had somebody stole six jugs since we made them? I counted them again and six was missing. And then I thought Moody must have took them. I was going to give him ten dollars for helping us, but he must have already took some of the jugs to sell as part of his pay.
When Moody come to the house that night I give him five dollars. “Is that all I get?” he said and set down at the table with his hat still on. I had tried to teach him to take his hat off when he come through the door.
“You have already took some of your pay in kind,” I said.
“It’s the only kind thing I get,” Moody said. He could always quip when he felt like it. But that’s all Moody would say. He didn’t tell where he had sold the molasses or how much he had got for them. I tried to think if there was some way to make liquor out of molasses. I reckon you can make liquor out of anything sweet. But with all the corn growed around the valley it would be a waste and a shame to use up good molasses that way.
I was coming out of the henhouse the next day when I seen Moody walking toward the smokehouse. Now, I never was one to spy on my younguns, but I was curious to see if he was going to get a jug of molasses. I had seven eggs in my apron and I laid them on a shelf in the shed and stood under the hemlock tree while Moody entered the smokehouse and come out carrying a jug of molasses. He closed the latch and started out the trail to the pasture. It was late in the evening and shadows stretched out from the pines like trains behind brides.
I didn’t want to spy on my own son, but I couldn’t help myself. I figured he was hiding jugs in the pasture where he could get them later. I always wondered where Moody hid his liquor on the place. I expected it was in the pine thicket. I kept trees between me and Moody as I followed him.
But he didn’t turn into the pine thicket. He crossed the branch and climbed right up the trail on the other side. And he followed the trail through the Richardses’ pasture. The Richards family had been quarantined because of typhoid. I wanted to holler out and tell Moody not to go there. But then he would see I had followed him. Surely he knowed Billy, the oldest boy, had the fever. Their spring had been condemned by the county, and they was having to dig a well.
No! I hollered in my mind. But I didn’t say nothing. I’d be ashamed for Moody to know I had followed him. I’d be ashamed for anybody to know I was spying on my own flesh and blood. I crouched down behind a Ben Davis apple tree.
Moody walked straight to the Richards house and climbed the steps. There was nobody in sight. He set the jug down beside the front door. He didn’t knock and he didn’t open the door, but turned and walked back down the steps to the road.
My heart thrust up into my throat, for I knowed he would see me in the apple trees if he come back toward the pasture. How would I explain that I’d watched him bring a jug of sorghum to the Richardses? I was ashamed of myself, and yet I was thrilled to see what Moody had done.
Instead of returning across the pasture, Moody turned on the road toward the church. In the shadows I couldn’t hardly see his face, but it appeared he was smirking, like he had a secret. I wanted to call out to him. I wanted to run to him and hug him and tell him how proud I was he was giving molasses to the Richardses. I wanted to beg him to forgive me for spying on him. But I stayed behind the tree and watched him disappear around the bend.
When I seen U. G. next time at the store he said, “Molly Bane asked me to tell you she was mighty grateful for the gallon of syrup you sent her.” The Banes had had two cases of typhoid fever that fall.
“What gallon?” I said.
“The one you had Moody bring them,” U. G. said.
“I’m glad it was
useful,” I said.
There was five other families in the valley that was struck with typhoid that fall. All but two of them lived. It turned out Moody had took every one of the families a jug of molasses without telling me. It was a side of him I knowed was there but didn’t see too often. It was a side I hoped he would show more.
“It’s a good thing you done,” I said to Moody one night, “taking the jugs of syrup to them that needed it.”
“What jugs?” Moody said.
“Them you took to the Richardses and Banes and the others,” I said.
“Ain’t no charity,” Moody said.
“It was a good thing,” I said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Moody said.
Before Christmas the typhoid fever had died out in the valley and I thanked the Lord it had passed over us.
Twenty
Muir
THE CORN WAS still standing in the fields, and Moody hadn’t lifted a finger to get it in. I told U. G. I would have to stop working in the store. I couldn’t help Mama and build the church and work at the store at the same time. I only had time to do what had to be done. I hitched up Old Fan to the wagon and gathered all the corn and throwed it into the crib and into the barn loft. It was so easy to hitch up the wagon and gather corn. Work seemed easy. I gathered every ear in the bottom fields and heaped the unshucked ears in the shelter of the crib and barn. I would shuck them later, a bushel or two at a time to take to mill. The work was smooth as a dance. All you had to do was go ahead with it. Work was the easiest and cleanest thing in the world. It was a year since I’d gone to the Tar River. I was glad to have the corn to gather so I could put off working on the church a few more days.
Soon as I got the corn all in, I gathered up a pick and shovel and crowbar to take down to the river. The most rocks was in the fast stretch at the end of the bottom, and in the creek just above where it run into the river. I needed thick rocks, and big rocks, but rocks not too big for me to carry. I needed rocks that would fit together in a wall. They could be any color or kind, as long as they could be joined together at the right thickness in a foundation and in the walls.
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