by John Ehle
JOHN EHLE (b. 1925) grew up the eldest of five children in the mountains of North Carolina, which would become the setting for many of his novels and several works of nonfiction. Following service in World War II, Ehle received his BA and MA at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he met the playwright Paul Green and began writing plays for the NBC radio series American Adventure. He taught at the university for ten years before joining the staff of the North Carolina governor Terry Sanford, where Ehle was a “one-man think tank,” the governor’s “idea man” from 1962 to 1964. (Sanford once said of Ehle: “If I were to write a guidebook for new governors, one of my main suggestions would be that he find a novelist and put him on his staff.”) The author of eleven novels, seven of which constitute his celebrated Mountain Novels cycle, and six works of nonfiction, Ehle divides his time between Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and New York City. He is married to the actress Rosemary Harris, with whom he has one daughter, Jennifer Ehle, also an actress.
LINDA SPALDING was born in Kansas and moved to Canada in 1982. She has written four novels, Daughters of Captain Cook, The Paper Wife, Mere (co-written with her daughter, Esta), and most recently, The Purchase, for which she received the Governor General’s Award. Among her nonfiction books are A Dark Place in the Jungle: Science, Orangutans, and Human Nature and Who Named the Knife: A True Story of Murder and Memory. Spalding is an editor of the journal Brick and has been awarded the Harbourfront Festival Prize for her contributions to Canadian literature.
THE MOUNTAIN NOVELS
The Land Breakers
The Road
The Journey of August King
Time of Drums
The Winter People
Lion on the Hearth
Last One Home
THE LAND BREAKERS
JOHN EHLE
Introduction by
LINDA SPALDING
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 1964 by John Ehle
Introduction copyright © 2014 by Linda Spalding
All rights reserved.
Cover image: Jack Beal, The Dark Pool, 1980; courtesy of the Estate of Jack Beal.
Cover design: Katy Homans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ehle, John, 1925–
The land breakers / John Ehle; introduction by Linda Spalding.
1 online resource. — (New York Review Books classics)(New York Review Books classics)
ISBN 978-1-59017-794-5 — ISBN 978-1-59017-763-1 (paperback)
1. Appalachian Region, Southern—Fiction. 2. North Carolina—History—1775–1865—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3555.H5
813'.54—dc23
2014013613
ISBN 978-1-59017-794-5
v1.0
For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.
CONTENTS
Biographical Notes
The Mountain Novels
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
Introduction
Dedication
Epigraph
THE LAND BREAKERS
1779
1
2
1780
3
4
5
6
7
1781
8
9
10
11
1782
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
1783
23
24
25
26
1784
27
INTRODUCTION
John Ehle, born in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1925, can trace his ancestry, through his mother, back to one of the first three families to settle the western mountains of North Carolina in the eighteenth century. The eldest of five children, he was expected to become a preacher and has vivid recollections of his grandmother on her porch swing discussing this with the local preacher. But after fighting in both Germany and Japan during World War II, he came home to enroll at the University of Chapel Hill, where, while working toward a master’s degree in drama, he began to write radio plays, half-hour programs about adventurers or heroes for the American Adventure series, which was broadcast on NBC and Radio Europe. Ehle’s apprenticeship in drama is evident throughout his subsequent work, in which character emerges most powerfully through the spoken word.
Ehle is the author of seventeen books, perhaps the best known of which is the 1988 nonfiction work, Trail of Tears, which tells the searing story of the Cherokee Nation and its eventual removal from North Carolina to Oklahoma. But it wasn’t until he embraced the historical novel that he found the subject of his heart and his indelible characters. This cycle of seven novels, dubbed by Ehle the Mountain Novels, follows the lives of several families who settle in the steep mountains of North Carolina, families with names like Wright and Harrison and King, while exploring various eras of Appalachian history, from the first mountain settlement to the Civil War, the building of the first railroad, and the 1920s and ’30s.
The first in that series, The Land Breakers, was written fifty years ago and stands absolutely on its own. It begins in 1779 with a man and a woman, hungry and young. They have been walking for two or three years looking for land on which to make a home, working their way down the continent, north to south. They were sent from Ireland as children, bonded servants, and now they are married and free with some money saved. When a storekeeper in Morganton, North Carolina, offers them foothold on a faraway mountain, he adds, “I don’t want to sell a tiny piece of it, though you look so needful. Have you come far?”
They have come far.
They have come to an almost nonexistent town and they stand looking into the distance at a mountain covered by trees and clouds and the narrow trails of ancient beasts. Nothing lives up there but wolves and panthers and a great, wanton bear. No person has ever made settlement in that high place. But with a horse and a cow, two sows, a boar, four chickens, and a she-dog, Mooney and Imy Wright climb for days, sleeping on the ground at night, until at last they find themselves enraptured and alone above the clouds. Choosing a spot on which to live their lives, they fell trees for a cabin, clear space for a garden, and carry water to make a fireplace of clay. The world is vast and empty around them but, by winter’s end, the darkly ambitious Tinkler Harrison arrives with a retinue of slaves and horses and cattle and a new young wife. With him is his daughter, Lorry, who brings two growing sons along with a load of resentment against her controlling father. Lorry’s husband has left to find a piece of land in Kentucky. He’s been gone two years, but Lorry believes he will return to their old homeplace in Virginia and wonders how he will ever find her now when she’s been forced to follow her father to this unknown, wild place.
When Tinkler calls a halt to his kingly procession, he sees Mooney behind a stand of trees digging a narrow grave: Imy has become the mountain’s victim. Survival is Ehle’s theme. Survival is the constant challenge that each settler must meet. Settlement will come more gradually, as a community is formed through mishap and outburst, through scrupulous plan or devious plot or simple tragedy.
Next to arrive on the mountain is the unseemly family of Ernest Plover, who is dependent on Tinkler and utterly wit
hout spine. He brings his unkempt, useless wife and a rabble of singing, barefoot daughters, the eldest of whom is the waiflike Pearlamina, bearing the apple to be bitten or ignored by a grieving Mooney. Bold but strangely innocent, Pearlamina entices Mooney with sudden, unexpected visits. “You build that by yourself?” she says admiringly, on first seeing him by his cabin. And she adds disdainfully, “I knowed a man in Virginia that could throw a horse.”
Ehle comes to his characters and their vivid language as naturally as his trees stand rooted to the earth. Of his wife’s constant pregnancies, Ernest says, “I don’t have to prick her; all I have to do is look at her, and she balloons out.” “Ash-looking” is what Lorry does to find potatoes in her fireplace. Imy’s coffin is a “bury box,” and “cabin-caught” is what they all become in winter and in darkest night. This gift of tongues brings delightful realism to characters who vary greatly one from another in spite of the valley they have all chosen to settle in and defy. The tensions that slowly build between them are ominous and thrilling. “Here we are, come together, and closer will we come.”
Mooney must find a wife. But will it be gentle Pearlamina, guileless and seductive, who is creating havoc in his heart?
He met her on the path one day. She was carrying her youngest sister along the path and was barefooted and held the baby close to her breasts. She walked toward him, her manner grave and serious, but she laughed softly in greeting him, so surprising him that he stopped. When he turned, he saw that she was watching him from farther along the path, and now she took the baby’s hand and waved it at him. “Hello. Say hello,” she said to the child.
Or will Mooney pursue the older and quieter Lorry, earthbound and sensible, the mother of sons, whose husband may appear at any moment? When Lorry visits Mooney’s cabin, she doesn’t “think she ought to sit down on the bed. That would be unseemly; also it would be deceptive, for she wasn’t anxious in her body yet.”
Ehle’s women are treated with equal shares of empathy and dispassion. Pliant or unyielding, fretful or persevering, they confront a primitive environment and succumb or thrive. The men, modest or ambitious, gentle or violent, must work toward settlement even during episodes of mortal conflict. Perched on the edge of an uncivilized world, they must decide whether to move on or stay, whether to build of this wood quickly or that wood slowly, whether to sit by a grave or carve out a garden, whether to love and in what fashion to hate. This country will know its torments, most of them human-caused. The wandering husband will appear with a loaded rifle and keen eye; the slave-owning Tinkler will do his utmost to become the mountain’s king; and other settlers will rattle and upset whatever compromise is found.
Who better to describe this place than a writer born and raised among its people, a writer who knows their particular language and ingrained habits of intemperance and benevolence. Even his landscape breathes, its plants curled to protect themselves, its rocks pressing hard against feet. There are the predators, too. Snakes and bears. Wolves. Pigs are carried off, sheep and dogs and chickens are killed because they have been brought by man and have no place in the natural world. Snakes inhabit scenes so horrifying, so brimful of detail as to suspend disbelief. Wolves provide the distant chorus behind each puzzlement, and the great bear speaks for the mountain, blessing and damning as he moves among the inheritors of ground and river and trees.
Ehle still lives in these mountains. He has covered enough ground that he sees through its layers, knowing the former forests and the creatures that wandered there and the tools used to destroy what belonged and then build something to take its place. Living people abide in these stories with all their bravery and blemishes. The blemishes were formed long before they set out for the mountain but it is up there that the settlers must look for grace. They have nothing worth keeping, nothing even close to worthy except for their hunger and belief in themselves.
The Land Breakers is a Chaucerian pageant—a pageant of herds and droves and carts and a beautiful woman on horseback and a man who believes himself to be king. It takes place in an early America with nothing to its credit but a people who have created themselves out of whatever it was that made them decide to up and go. It’s the something that gets into Mooney and Imy as they make their way south inch by workaday inch. And what a force of new heart they bring to rushing creeks and the apparitional bear and the encroaching neighbors with their own unquenchable needs. These people will succeed or fail but they will lay down the structure of whatever lasts. They will be followed by their descendants in Ehle’s six other chronicles of the mountain and its people. These books revolve around individual crises of faith or pride or class and each one stands entire. Appalachia has found a voice in Ehle’s great achievement.
—LINDA SPALDING
THE LAND BREAKERS
To Betty Smith and to the memory of Rogers Terrill
There is America, which at this day serves for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men and uncouth manners, yet shall . . . show itself equal to the whole of that commerce which now attracts the envy of the world.
—EDMUND BURKE to the people of England, 1775
1779
1
It was early summer when the two young people arrived in Morganton, which was little more than a long muddy street with poles stuck in the mudholes, and a few stores here and there. Also there was a place where the court sat in court season, and from the main street one could see far off in the west a blue wall rising from the hilly country, a chain of mountains, the highest in the eastern half of the continent. Mooney and Imy Wright were interested in them, for land was what they wanted, a place for a home, but they were told that nobody lived up there, that the wild animals owned it. There were trails, but no settlements. There was a settlement at Watauga on beyond the mountains, but the Indians were fighting there, making it all bloody ground. In the mountains themselves there was not a clearing, not a house, not a shed, and nobody except an occasional hunter ever entered that wild country.
Mooney and Imy had been married only two or three years, but they had known each other since childhood. They had been sent on the same boat to Philadelphia from Ulster in North Ireland, a land which had been settled by the Scots, so they were Scots, really, and were called Scotch-Irish. They had been apprenticed out at eleven years of age to a family named Martingale, which had six children of its own but which had a lot of land to tend and a mill, which took much work. Imy cooked for the family, and Mooney worked in the mill. The judge who sent them to the Martingales had decreed that “Each child shall receive eighteen months of school except that the girl need have no more than twelve, and proper food and care, and in return for work done, when the child shall have reached the age of twenty-one, he shall receive certain goods. The boy shall be given a horse, a bridle, a saddle, a gun, and three good suits of clothes. The girl shall be given a calf, a bed, an iron pot, and three suits of clothes.”
So at the age of twenty-one, they got these possessions and prepared to leave home. Their leaving was disappointing to the Martingales, who looked on Mooney and Imy as their own relatives; in that community the two of them were known and liked by everybody. In spite of that, the young people took their horse, their calf and other possessions and went on toward the south, for it had been their dream for some time to have a place of their own, to make for themselves a proper farm. She, a tall, thin woman with sharp-featured face and clear blue eyes, led the calf, and he, a tall, strong man, handsome and tough of muscles and skin, led the horse.
They had sought good land they could work on their own, but it wasn’t so easy to find. Many men had more than they needed, but they wouldn’t sell any of it. Mooney and Imy found nothing at all that was rich and promising.
For their keep, and sometimes for a bit of pay, they cut wood fuel, plowed fields, worked crops, grubbed stumps, and Imy cooked and tended house for other women. They harvested apples in Virginia and moved on south. They had worked in a mill that winter and moved on. They worked h
ere and there, for a bag of meal, for new shoe leather, for a pup she-dog. They made slow progress, and their dream kept getting pared down.
They helped a man on the Yadkin—a river in North Carolina—get his crops in, and he let them stay in one room of his two-room house. He told the men of that section that Mooney Wright could lift a four-hundred-pound weight, could fell a bull with a blow, could fit stones together for a fireplace or a river dam.
They had put their young cow to his bull, but the calf was born dead, for the cow was weak from the long road. They had put their dog to a hound, but they got nothing. Nothing had responded to them, and wouldn’t, Mooney said, until they had their own land. Even Imy herself didn’t warm life-seed into sprouting. So they had no home, no land to work, on which the roots of their lives could grow. There was talk now of fighting going on elsewhere with the English and of a new country being born, but they had no part of it, no stake at all.
“You might consider settling in that mountain land yourself,” the Morganton storekeeper told Mooney and Imy. He was a man of thin face and lips and a long nose. “A man come through and give me a map of part of it.” He took out a parchment and opened it, studied it with mild interest, ran a dirty forefinger along its marked lines. “He told me this little river here is fresh and fish-filled, with a valley as flat as God’s palm on the north side, and then right here a tall mountain rises. The man drawed me this and said no better land is anywhere, but it’s not tamed.”
They asked how much it cost to buy land there, asking out of courtesy, for they didn’t want land so far off. Mooney didn’t think of himself as an explorer or adventurer. He was a farmer, and he could build some things with his hands, and Imy could make cloth and sew.
But they asked how much the land was anyway, as they had asked before in Virginia and other places.
