This Rock

by Robert Morgan

  I’d almost finished the sardines when I seen this old man watching me. He was hid by some sweet-shrub bushes along the river and dressed in a rough gray coat and crushed hat. He peeked around a tree not more than fifty feet away.

  “Howdy,” I said, like the old man was not hiding or spying on me. I acted like he was in the open and I’d just seen him.

  The man pushed his gray head around the trunk and peered like he wasn’t sure he’d heard me.

  “How do?” I said.

  The old man stepped out quick from behind the bushes and come closer. All his clothes was ragged and he carried a pistol in his belt. “Are you fit?” he said.

  I wasn’t sure that’s what he said, but I couldn’t make any other sense out of the old man’s words. “Fit as I’ll ever be, I guess,” I said. I wished the man didn’t have the pistol in his belt.

  “Having a picnic, eh?” the old man said. He looked hard at the sardine can in my hand.

  “Would you like some sardines?” I said. I could smell the old man. He smelled like rags that had laid in an attic for years.

  “Don’t look like you’ve got none to share,” the old man said. He put his hands in his pockets.

  “Got plenty,” I said and pulled a can of sardines out of the paper bag. “Here.”

  It took the old man several tries to get the key fitted on the lip of tin. But once he did he soon rolled back the top and begun eating sardines with his fingers. He set down on the bank beside me and I passed him the box of soda crackers.

  “Much obliged, young sir,” the old man said. He eat like he hadn’t had a bite for days. Suddenly he wiped his right hand on his pants and took the pistol out of his belt and laid it on the ground at his side.

  “You ain’t planning on settling here?” he said and looked hard at me. Drops of oil and cracker crumbs had caught in his beard.

  “Just stopped for a bite,” I said.

  The old man looked at the packsack on the ground, at my .22 rifle and blanket roll. “I couldn’t let you do that,” he said. “I wouldn’t let you settle here.”

  “Who are you?” I said.

  “I look after this settlement,” the old fellow said.

  “What settlement is that?” I said.

  “The river, Davidson River.” He gestured toward the woods upstream and the woods downstream. I looked around expecting to see a house or clearing I’d missed before. There was nothing but trees.

  “They’re all gone now, but they’ll be back,” the old man said. “I’m what you might call a caretaker, looking after the place till they come back.”

  “Where did they go?” I said.

  “Some went to Texas, and some went west to Ar-kansas, and some moved all the way to Montana, I reckon. The Whites moved to Asheville, but they’ll be back.”

  I looked around again, like I was trying to find something in the woods along the river I’d missed before.

  “Couldn’t let you settle here,” the old man said. “It’s my job to look after things.”

  “I see,” I said. The old man picked up the pistol but didn’t point it at me. He held it straight out in front of him.

  “Do you see, boy?” he said.

  “So you’re the caretaker?” I said.

  “My daddy was the preacher, Charlie Pyle,” the old man said. “When they left to go to Ar-kansas I stayed here.”

  “Why did you stay?” I said.

  “Stayed back here to hunt and fish, I thought. And then after they was all gone it come to me little by little over the years what my job was. That’s the way it comes to a man, to see his purpose little by little. I seen I was left here not just to hunt and fish and trap muskrats out of the mountains. I was chose to stay behind and look after things till they all come back. Right over yonder is where the school was.” He pointed through the sycamores along the riverbank. But I didn’t see nothing except more trees in the flats.

  “When are they coming back?” I said, keeping my eye on the tip of the pistol. It was an old cavalry .45 model, scratched and dirty. I couldn’t tell if it was actually loaded.

  “They’re coming back anytime,” the old man said with a challenge in his voice like he thought I might not believe him. “The Partridge house was right over there below the spring. I was sweet on Mary Alice Partridge. Me and her will marry when they come back.”

  The old man turned and looked me hard in the eye. “You can’t settle here, boy,” he said.

  “Just passing through,” I said, “on my way to Black Balsam.”

  “This land is took,” the old man said.

  “I can see that,” I said.

  “Me and Mary Alice used to play by the spring,” he said. “Do you know what an ebbing and flowing spring is?”

  “Can’t say I do,” I said.

  “It’s a spring that’ll gush out all at once like it’s in spate and then after a few minutes goes dry, or nearly dry. And then after a while it’ll start gushing again.”

  “Why does it do that?” I said. The pistol on the old man’s lap was aimed almost straight at me.

  “Mr. Bailey that used to teach school here said it was some kind of siphon,” the old man said.

  “A siphon?”

  “Like a holler place in the mountain that’ll fill up, and when it’s full a drain at the lip that acts like a siphon will empty it.” The old man finished his sardines and throwed the can into the bushes. He wiped his hands on leaves and then on his pants.

  “Let me see your pistol,” I said.

  “Couldn’t let you settle here,” he said, “even though I can tell you’re neighborly. No spare land here to settle.”

  “Just passing through,” I said.

  “Couldn’t let you do that, if you tried to claim and clear a place,” the old man said. “Much as I’d admire to have your company.”

  “I’m on my way to Black Balsam,” I said. “But it’s a good thing you’re looking after the place.”

  “You’re welcome to camp here,” the old man said. “I’m staying here myself till my folks come back.”

  “Have you heard from them?” I said.

  “Not in the last few days,” the old man said. He looked at his hands like he was trying to remember.

  “Maybe they’ll write soon,” I said.

  “They’ll come back,” the old man snapped, like I had disputed him.

  “Yes,” I said, “and they’ll be grateful you’ve looked after things.” I put my hand in the bag, took out two candy bars, and handed one to the old man. He tore off the wrapper like a little kid opening a Christmas present. Then he eat the candy slow, savoring every crumb of chocolate and caramel, every peanut and chewy clot.

  “You’re not a preacher?” the old man said.

  “No, I ain’t a preacher,” I said.

  “We already got a preacher,” he said. “My daddy’s a minister of the gospel.”

  “I’ve got to get going,” I said. I reached for the packsack and the .22 rifle in the leaves. The old man picked up the pistol and aimed it at me. I reached out to brush it aside but realized he was handing it to me.

  “It’s a Colt forty-five, like cowboys carry,” he said.

  The revolver was heavy and dirty. It was so old the edges of the cylinder was rounded. I spun the cylinder and seen all the chambers was empty. I pulled back the hammer and seen the spring was broke. From the dirt caked in the action and in the barrel, it was clear the pistol had not been fired for years. “That’s a real Colt,” I said and handed the gun back.

  “Got to finish my patrol,” the old man said. He licked the chocolate off his fingers. “Every week I go from the mouth of the river to the highest spring up yon side of Looking Glass Rock. Do you know where the Pink Beds is?”

  “I’ve heard of them.”

  “I look after the Pink Beds too,” the old man said, “where people used to camp out in summer with their wagons and tents, and even their cows and chickens, among the pink flowers. People from Asheville and down in South
Carolina.”

  I stood up and put on the packsack with the blanket roll tied over it. I cradled the rifle under my arm. “My name is Powell,” I said.

  “My name is Pyle,” the old man said. He watched me walk away. When I’d gone maybe a dozen rods he called out, “Watch out for painters in the Balsams.” I walked another few paces, then turned to wave at him, but he was nowhere in sight. He’d vanished into the brush along the river.

  I FOLLOWED A wagon road along the river past several old homesteads with standing chimneys and cellar holes full of leaves. There was a few log buildings sunk in like they’d been pushed down. I seen patches of periwinkles and old boxwoods in the yards, set out by women long ago. I passed a mill and seen a millstone laying in the leaves like the wheel of a stone cart. There was a log church at the forks with its steeple wrecked by a blowed-down tree.

  Where are these families now? I thought. The old man is patrolling this ghost community day after day and decade after decade. I passed an old schoolhouse where a rusty bell still rested on its post, ready to ring children in from recess. It looked like everybody had been snatched away, the way the Bible said the saved would be took at the Rapture, when beds and graves would be emptied.

  Where the road turned up one of the tributary creeks, I seen a little patch of tombstones in the woods. They was hand carved, with rough letters, and some had leaned so far they’d toppled over. Catbriars covered some of the stones. I could see the name JONES on one and IN GLORY scratched on another. Broke jars was scattered in the leaves where flowers had been brought years ago.

  I thought I was past the old community when I come to one last cabin in the woods. The house looked so little I thought at first it must be a shed or cow stall, maybe a lean-to hunters used. But there was an old window cut in its gable where a loft had been and where children must have slept on pallets. Vines growed out of the windows.

  The door of the weathered cabin was gone, but I could see the rags of leather hinges that once held it in place. And then I noticed something else on the doorpost. There was a rag tied all the way around the post like a bandanna. It was faded and dirty with mold. Stepping closer, I lifted the edge of the cloth and it tore in my hand. But I could see it had once been red, a kind of red scarf knotted around the wood. I remembered that when there was smallpox or typhoid in a house in the old days they tied a red cloth on the door to warn those passing to stay away. If there was an epidemic, a red cloth would be tied to a tree by the road to warn travelers not to stop. I jerked my fingers away from the rag and rubbed them on a nearby tree. I knowed germs wouldn’t last on a rag all those years, but even so, I brushed my hand on the bark.

  FOLLOWING THE WAGON road up the narrow creek valley, I seen the sheer face of Looking Glass Rock ahead. It was a mountain of solid granite with a great bald dome and half a scalp of trees on its top. The mountain rose straight up for a thousand feet before curving back to a brow. I’d never seen anything as steep or as big. Who needs to build a church when a rock that big is already set in the wilderness? I thought. And then I thought, No, what is in nature is not the same as what is made by hands. The fact that something is made with human design gives it a special kind of beauty and meaning.

  The road run right up under the foot of Looking Glass Rock, and I seen straight above me little streams that run through grooves down the solid rock. Names was carved at the bottom, and pictures that looked like signs from an unknown language. Fires had blacked the base in places. Bushes growed out of cracks in the big rock. Everything was on such a grand scale. The rock was bigger than any cathedral. Hemlocks growing out of the wet soil at its foot was eight or ten feet in diameter. The laurel bushes rose high as trees out of the rotten leaves beneath the rock.

  Looking at my contour map, I seen I’d need to leave the road just beyond Looking Glass Rock. Got out my compass and found roughly what direction I needed to go in. The peak of Big Pisgah was to the right, steep and pointed as a fodder stack across the distance of clear air. I needed to go west along the chain of ridges. I was looking across the valley of the Pink Beds to the shoulder of Clawhammer Mountain. A trail bent off to the left and I followed it.

  There is something comforting and thrilling about walking toward the west. I had always wanted to see Black Balsam and the higher mountains to the west. The west is like a magnet that pulls you toward something big and new.

  Climbing with the pack and rifle slowed me down pretty quick. As I climbed I felt the power go out of my chest. Long before my legs was tired I felt tired in my chest and throat. The blood knows when you’re tired, I thought. As I climbed I thought how time was like the force of gravity, pulling you down, dragging you down, wearing you out. Preacher Liner and the board of deacons, Moody with his sarcasm, Annie, they all wore me down.

  Climbing is so simple it’s hard to understand why it’s so tiring. You just lift one foot ahead of the other and step a little higher. The muscles behind the knees raise you an inch at a time, half an inch. One little step at a time and you raise yourself out of the creek valley and into the sky. It’s the leverage done with your feet on the great wedge of the mountain.

  I slowed down and plunged my toes into the leaves step after step. I walked sideways, zigzagging up the steepest places. My boots sunk in the soft dirt under the leaves, making toeholds there.

  Finally I come around the end of the ridge and seen a cliff far above me. It was a vast rock that jutted out in layers like a face, with chin and lips, nose and eyebrows. In the late sun the face looked coppery and shiny. Reminded me of pictures of the Sphinx. The cliff hung high as a cloud, dark and threatening.

  I got out my map and searched the lines and names. Where I thought I was, was the name Devil’s Courthouse and the elevation 5,740 feet. The only other name along the ridge was Black Balsam. I was looking right up at Devil’s Courthouse. I knowed the place had been named by the Cherokees, but the cliff didn’t look much like a courthouse. It resembled an ugly face sticking out of the mountain.

  The valley was almost dark. I took off the pack and looked for a level place in the leaves. I found a kind of shelf and made a fire and then cut some pine boughs for my bed. Instead of cooking anything I decided to eat more of the sardines and crackers. But I boiled some water for coffee. It was already cold in the valley under the cliff, and I could see ice on the rock high above me. Soon as I eat I washed my hands in a branch and wrapped the blanket around me. Then I set by the fire sipping coffee till I was too sleepy to hold my eyes open.

  Once in the night I heard a boom like a shotgun or a cannon. There was an echoing chain of booms like a train makes in a freight yard. But I didn’t hear it again and wasn’t sure but what I dreamed it. All night the cold air from the cliff slid down and gathered close around me.

  NEXT MORNING THERE was ice along the branch and in my canteen. Even wrapped in the blanket and in my mackinaw coat I was cold in my bones. The fire had burned out and I had to scratch in the leaves for twigs and sticks to start it again. My hands trembled when I struck a match, but I kept them cupped around the flame till it caught on one little sliver and then another, lighting the shadowy woods floor.

  I’d ground my coffee at home and put it in a waterproof can. I set a pan of water beside the coffeepot to boil for grits, then gathered more sticks to make the fire bright. Nothing’ll make you appreciate houses like camping out in cold weather, I thought. The most common things like tables and stoves suddenly become valuable and wonderful.

  As I eat steaming grits from the pan, I begun to wake up and gather strength. The soreness in my back and legs from the day before was still there but mellowed by a night’s sleep. I put on clean socks and laced up my boots. The cliff above, facing west, was still dark. I could barely see its features. I kicked the remains of the fire out, rolled up the blanket, and strapped on the packsack. I took one short step, and then another and another. A deer bounded away, flashing its tail like a lantern.

  By the time I’d climbed halfway up the ridge I was
sweating and out of breath. I stopped to rest and seen a tree beside me that was not a white pine or a hemlock. Its needles was short and glittered like blue crystals. The tree was almost black. That was a balsam, the first balsam I’d ever seen in the wild. I touched the sharp stiff spines. The bark was scaly and covered with lichens and moss. I looked out along the ridge and seen others pointed like steeples. They was trees out of the North. I’d read they’d been stranded on the peaks here since the last Ice Age.

  I broke off a twig and sniffed the incense of the sap. It smelled sweeter than a white pine and reminded me of Christmas and the Wise Men’s frankincense and myrrh. The black trees was scattered on the slope above, getting thicker and thicker, until at the top the ridge was covered with them.

  It was hard to push through the balsams, they was so stiff and scratchy. I picked my way from open space to open space. Limbs broke and stung my hands like released springs. Litter sifted down my collar. Needles raked my cheeks.

  When I got to the top of the ridge I couldn’t see a thing. The spruce and firs was so thick I couldn’t even be sure I was on top. Wind hummed in the trees above me, and I heard a distant roar on the other side, far below. Could it be wind in the gap? And then I heard a hoof-hoof-hoof sound, and a boom like two buildings had crashed together. Was the mountain making noise inside? I’d heard of mountains that groaned and roared and boomed in their guts. Was that the reason the Cherokees had been afraid of this ridge and thought it was haunted by the devil?

  I tore my way left through the terrible thicket. Finally I saw sunlight ahead and pushed out into the open. It was a clearing with weeds and mountain ash and sumac. I shaded my eyes against the rising sun and looked far down the mountainside. At first I just seen smoke and couldn’t tell what I was looking at. Hoof-hoof-hoof, come the sound from below. Then I seen the train engine puffing up the valley. Hadn’t seen a railroad on the topographical map.