This Rock

by Robert Morgan

  All at once I seen the valley below clearer, and I smelled the scent of timber on the wind coming up the ridge. And I smelled smoke and seen all the hollers and slopes below had been stripped of trees. There was tangles of logs and stacks of logs and piles of burning brush. I seen steam shovels spurting smoke, and trucks and cranes on the slope. The mountainside had been slashed and looked ugly as a mangy dog. There was rough bridges on stilts across branches, and roads cut into the slopes. There was so much litter of logs and brush, the mountainside looked chewed up and spit out.

  “Hey, bud, what are you doing here?” somebody yelled.

  I turned and seen a man in uniform pointing a gun at me. He wore a hat like an army sergeant’s, with a wide flat brim. “What are you doing here, buddy?” he said, stepping closer.

  He had a thin mustache and a fat gold ring with a white stone on the hand that held the rifle. “This land was leased by the Sunburst Lumber Company,” he said. “Trespassers will be prosecuted.”

  “I’m just hiking to Black Balsam,” I said. I hated to be questioned. He had took me by surprise.

  “You just hike right on,” the man said. “Where you from?”

  “Where are you from?” I said, suddenly angry.

  The man stepped back and cocked the .30-30, aiming the deer rifle at my chest. “I’m from the other end of this rifle. Now get!” he said. He pushed the tip of the rifle at my belly and I backed away. He pushed it again and I stepped further back into the little clearing.

  “Go back where you come from, bud,” he said.

  I hated to have a rifle pulled on me that way. I felt helpless as a child threatened by a hickory switch. Tears come to my eyes as I turned and walked toward the thicket of balsams. My will had been bent in the most unexpected way in the most unexpected place. At the edge of the trees I turned to face the man in uniform.

  “Get on away from here!” he yelled. “Are you too dumb to understand English?”

  As I plunged into the thicket, tears broke from my eyes. I pushed aside limbs and was knocked sideways by the heavy pack. Briars and twigs clawed at my clothes. A needle hit me in the right eye. When I’d gone about a hundred yards down the slope I stopped. Bits of bark and twigs stuck to the tears on my cheeks. I wiped my eyes with the back of my left hand.

  If I climbed back up to the little clearing and shot the ranger with the .22, nobody would know who done it. Nobody knowed where I was in the mountains. I could shoot the guard from the edge of the trees and the bastard would never know what hit him. Or I could blast him in the belly so he’d die slow and painful, looking at his bloody uniform as he bled to death.

  Get away from here. Now get. I kept hearing his ugly voice in my mind. I was sick of people talking to me that way. The guard had scared me and humiliated me, like the sheriff and the others. I stopped to rest, thinking I might go right back up the ridge and shoot the ranger. But more than likely he was waiting for me. In fact, he probably expected me to come back. I thought of just calling off the camping trip and going home. But there was nothing back home but the mess of my church foundation on the mountaintop. There didn’t seem to be any place to go to. I thought of ambushing the man in uniform and burying his body in the thicket. Nobody would ever know what happened to him.

  Taking the map out of my pack, I unfolded it on the ground and studied its sections. I was in the gap west of Devil’s Courthouse and just a few miles from the high peak of Black Balsam. What I could do was circle back around the thickets and then climb up on the peak itself. It had not appeared that the logging operation reached that high. If I was careful to stay in the fir trees nobody would see me. I could reach the peak and camp there and think about what to do next.

  It took me all morning to drop back down into the hardwoods and work my way back along the chain of ridges toward Black Balsam. I kept the map in hand and took out the compass several times to check direction. Every time I thought of the ranger I stomped the ground and kicked the leaves. At dinnertime I didn’t stop to build a fire, but eat the last can of sardines and the last candy bar.

  After washing my hands in a seep spring and drying them on bark, I begun to climb the peak of Black Balsam. Starting slow, going steady from step to step and rock to rock, I swung past beech trees and hickory trees. There was patches of snow on the ground as I got higher. The air was thin and cold. When I reached the fir trees I walked slower, trying to skirt the thickest clusters of balsams. I wondered if I could point a gun at the ranger. I wondered if I could shoot him.

  The trees on the summit had not been cut. But when I reached the top I could hear the chuff-chuff-chuff of the steam engines and the shouts of men and whinnies of horses. The edge of the cut timber was only a few hundred yards down the other side of the peak. I took off the pack and left it at the very top. With the rifle in my left hand I crawled to where I could look down on the slashed and stripped mountainside and valley.

  I was afraid I’d see the ranger standing in the clearing waiting for me. And I was hoping I would see him there. But what I seen instead was dozens of men sawing logs with crosscuts and chopping off limbs. Teams of four and six oxen pulled the logs out of the hollers below. A steam shovel swung the logs up on a platform. I looked for the dinky engine I’d seen from Devil’s Courthouse. I could still hear the hoof-hoof-hoof of the locomotive, and its whistle, but it was miles below the oxen and sawing crews. There was trails and haul roads cut here and there through the tangles of logs and piles of brush.

  And then I seen how they got the logs down the mountain to the railroad. There was a cofferdam on a branch up near the head of the valley, and a trough made of planks running down from it. The trough was raised on stilts across gullies and draws. Water splashed and flashed in its course as the trough shot over trestles and hollers down the mountainside. At several platforms beside the flume, logs was piled by steam shovels to be rolled one at a time into the chute of rushing water. A log put in the trough darted down the mountainside, bumping and knocking the planks of the chute until it was out of sight.

  It was a clever way of carrying logs down the mountainside to the railroad. I had to give them credit for that. They’d ruined the mountain, but they showed they was experts at their work. Men with peaveys and pry hooks rolled logs one after the other into the rushing flume. As I watched, I seen a log get stuck in the trough. Maybe it was an extra-big log, or maybe it had a knot on it. I couldn’t tell. Maybe there was a loose nail on the chute that caught the end of the log.

  Water splashed and sprayed in a rooster tail out of the trough where the big log was jammed. Water moved so fast in the trough it sprayed up ten or fifteen feet. There was a rainbow on the plume of spray. Several of the men climbed out along the rim of the flume to dislodge the timber with cant hooks. A man in a brown uniform stood below the flume waving his arms like he was shouting directions. He looked like the guard that had pulled the rifle on me. I raised my .22 rifle and put the bead on him. But he must have been a quarter of a mile away. I lowered the barrel.

  The man in uniform climbed up the braces of the trestle into the splashing water and grabbed a cant hook from one of the other men. He tried to wrestle the big log free.

  Out of the corner of my eye I seen the crew at the highest platform on the flume roll another log toward the trough. Surely they could see what was going on below them. Surely they wasn’t going to put another log in the shooting water. Three men on the top platform got behind the log with their peaveys and started rolling it. They prodded and levered the log to the lip of the trough.

  The log rolled into the chute like a bullet had been dropped into the chamber of a gun. It shot away, slowed at a turn, then speeded up again. I seen that the trough curved around the slope just enough so the men on the second platform couldn’t see the top one.

  The man in the brown uniform climbed into the trough far below to get a better purchase on the jammed log. He was not looking up the mountainside. He appeared to be hollering at the other men and giving them ord
ers. In the splash of the spray he probably couldn’t even see the flume above or hear what anybody said to him.

  The new log swung to the long curve and dropped in the flume like a mink darting for a kill. I wondered, If I holler will he hear me, or if I fire the rifle will he hear the shot? But it was too far away, and I didn’t even try to warn him.

  When the rushing timber hit the jammed log, the ranger in the uniform went flying off to the side. He rose like he was throwed by dynamite, and then he fell into the valley far below. The clashed logs spun in different directions, throwing off splinters. Men come running from all over the mountainside. The trough stood intact, the water fast and sparkling in its groove.

  I was almost too weak with fear and excitement to crawl back into the thicket and climb up to the summit. My hand trembled as it held the rifle. When I reached the packsack I set down on the cushion of needle litter to rest.

  Later a steam whistle blowed and blowed and blowed below. I guess they was carrying the body of the ranger down the mountain toward Asheville. I was sure he was the same guard who had threatened me. I smelled the moss and mold under me, and the balsam rosin above me. I would camp just under the rim of the peak that night and boil three or four of the eggs I’d brought with me. I was sure there was enough water in my canteen. But I would start for home in the morning.

  Twenty-two

  Ginny

  I HAD NEVER thought I would know pain worse than the death of my husband, Tom, and the death of my daughter Jewel, and I didn’t till I seen my boys filled with hate and enmity toward each other and fighting right in the house on Christmas Day. It was the saddest hour, and the saddest sight, to watch Muir kick Moody on the floor and Moody so drunk he didn’t hardly know what was happening.

  If Moody had done what Muir said he had, it was a terrible thing. To destroy the work of another, especially work on a church, shows a disrespect and hate, a destructive rage, that is hard to forgive. Muir had already worked so long and sacrificed so much for his vision of the church house. He had tried so long to find his way as he blundered and stumbled and come to dead ends. And now he was humiliated to have his work ruined.

  WHEN MUIR FIRST said he was going to build a church on top of Meetinghouse Mountain my quick thought was fear. For he had been disappointed so many times and he felt like such a failure after wanting to preach and driving to the North and trying to trap on the Tar River. I was his mama and I didn’t think he could stand any more disappointment. I didn’t want him to be humbled and humiliated again.

  But my second thought was: What a wonderful ambition he has. What a wonderful idea and vision for the community and for the future. Pa had built the church that stood now when most of the valley was woods with just a few cabins. Pa had raised a place of worship and a place of prayer in the wilderness. It was such a necessary and such a hard thing to do.

  You can manage to worship and pray out in the woods or under an open sky. The Lord will hear you wherever you are. But that’s not the same as having a consecrated place, a place set aside for fellowship and communion with the Creator, for song and praise. A church makes a community come into meaning. A church raises a collection of houses and homesteads into a community. A valley ain’t whole until it has a patch of consecrated ground.

  But my boy Muir was too young for such a job. He had built walls of rock, and he had built a little chimney for the molasses furnace. In his heart he was a builder. I could see that. But I was afraid a church, a rock church like he had in mind, on top of the mountain, was too much for him. Almost too much for any one man, much less for a boy in his late teens. But I wanted a new church too. I didn’t know what to say.

  “Can you do so much heavy work by yourself?” I said.

  “I have always done heavy work,” Muir said.

  And that was true. Muir could only work by hisself. He got riled up and argued if he tried to work with anybody else. He wouldn’t take orders, and he wouldn’t take any criticism. But he had always done the heaviest work on the place, the chopping and digging, the lifting and plowing.

  I knowed also that to do the Lord’s work is a privilege. To do the hard work that is give to us is an honor. It was the only way for Muir to get beyond his confusion and his pain, to do the work he was called to do. What greater happiness is there than to do the work we are give?

  But Muir was young and he was only human. I seen there was a lot of pride and vanity mixed up in his plans, like there was in his ambition to preach. He wanted to impress Annie. He didn’t only want to build a church; he wanted to build a big church, like he had seen in books, and in pictures in magazines. It was a prideful ambition, to build a white steeple that shot higher than the trees, that could be seen from one end of the valley to the other and maybe beyond.

  Yet nobody done anything of importance unless they had some pride, and some ambition in their vision. Pride was all mixed up with the calling and the will to make and to achieve. I seen that, and I seen I had to be careful what I said. A mama has more influence than she realizes sometimes. A mama can hurt the confidence in her child without hardly knowing it.

  From the first I planned to help Muir at the right time. I had to see if he could start the church on his own and get it going. He had started so many things and dropped them. And then I would help him with money, and help him do the work. But I had to find out if he really meant to do the job or was just dreaming, the way he had about going to Canada. If I helped him out and made it too much my project, he might lose interest. If it seemed like I was telling him what to do, I knowed he would lose interest.

  But on Christmas Eve, when somebody busted up the foundation Muir had laid, I seen it was time to help. If Moody had done the dirty work it was my job to help get the work started again. And if Moody had not done it, as he said he hadn’t, it was still my place to help. I felt an enthusiasm for the work on the mountaintop, and I felt drawed to it the way I was drawed to brush arbor services when I was young. The destruction of Muir’s work made me angry, and it made me want to be a part of the work. The thought of the white steeple pointing up into the sky on the summit stirred my heart more than anything had in years.

  I made up my mind to tell Muir I was going to help him start again after he left with his packsack. If he come back, I would tell him I’d buy tools and lumber and nails for the church. I’d help him any way I could.

  I DIDN’T HARDLY know what to say to Moody once Muir had packed up his haversack and took his rifle and gone off to the woods. Moody was my son and I loved him, but he just seemed to get angrier. I thought I had seen signs in him of softening. I knowed there was good in him, if he’d just let it come out. But if he had ruined Muir’s work, he was worser, not better. It was like he was trying to get revenge for what he thought the world had done him.

  After Muir was gone I seen Moody putting on his boots and coat. He had a little .32 pistol which he kept in the closet, and he slipped that into his coat pocket. He had a grim, almost ashy look, like he was sick at his stomach.

  “Where are you going?” Fay said.

  “I have a little job to do,” Moody said.

  “You’re not going to tear up Muir’s work even more?” I said. I felt sick at my stomach to hear myself say that.

  Moody turned to face me, the way he hadn’t in a long time. There was a set to his jaw. He was completely sober. “Is that what you think of me?” Moody said. “I can see you have a high opinion of me.”

  “Did you do it?” Fay said.

  “I don’t know what to think,” I said. The change in Moody’s manner was alarming.

  “I think I know who done it,” Moody said.

  “Who?” I said. “Who would do such a thing?” It give me hope that he seemed to be denying it. Moody snuffed his nose the way he done when he was sober and serious. “I have an idea,” he said.

  “Don’t you go get in trouble,” I said and pointed to the pistol in his pocket.

  “There is already trouble,” Moody said.


  What had happened on Christmas Eve had scared Moody. I could see that. Muir’s anger had scared him, and Muir’s accusations. There was more going on than I could understand. Whatever had happened to Muir’s church foundation had something to do with Moody, even if Moody hadn’t done it hisself.

  I asked Moody what he knowed that he wasn’t telling. But he just said he was going to find out. He had some suspicions. I told him I was sure Muir hadn’t hurt nobody.

  “Nobody but me,” Moody said.

  “Watching you all fight is the saddest thing I’ve ever seen,” I said.

  “It’s sad for me too,” Moody said.

  My heart jumped up in my throat, to see the change in Moody. There was something really different about the way he acted.

  “Everybody is against him, and his big plans,” I said.

  “He thinks I’m against him,” Moody said.

  I was so pleased and hopeful about the change in Moody I didn’t know what to say. I had been right about the signs of a growing and a sobering in him. The great black weight on my heart lifted a little.

  “Nobody else in this whole valley wants to do nothing,” Moody said. “Muir is crazy, but he is the only one here with an idea in his head. His schemes may be foolish, but at least he tries.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “There is some business that has to be attended to,” Moody said. He took some biscuits from the top of the stove and put them in his coat pocket. He patted the handle of the pistol. “A gun talks even when it don’t say nothing,” Moody said.

  But no good could come of seeking revenge. Everything I’d ever seen told me that. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. Only the spirit of forgiveness could win in the end.

  EVERYTHING WAS SO quiet in the house with both Muir and Moody gone. I was thinking about how I planned to help Muir with his church when somebody knocked on the back door. It was Hank Richards.

  Hank was a neighbor I never seen much of, except at church, because he was always off building houses at the cotton mill and around the lake, or down in South Carolina. He was a deacon of the church and a close neighbor, but I seen little of him.