Cold Sassy Tree

by Olive Ann Burns

  Mr. Tuttle hadn't offered me a picking job since that time us boys pulled up an acre of his onion crop to dam the stream between his pasture and ours. We were making a swimming hole. Our daddies paid for the onions and we all worked out the money, but Mr. Tuttle never forgave us.

  Well, so I didn't have a soul to go fishing with but T.R.

  T.R.'s real name was Theodore Roosevelt. He was just a puppy when Papa took me to Atlanta to hear the president speak; I named him Theodore Roosevelt when I got home that day—then shortened it to T.R. so folks wouldn't think my dog was a Republican.

  Naturally I didn't carry a fishing pole. No use looking disrespectful of the dead. In one pocket of my overalls I had me a line, and my sinkers and my hooks stuck in a cork. Stuffed in another pocket were some biscuits, to wad up into dough balls to bait the hooks with, and five pieces of Queenie's fried chicken in case I got hungry. I would cut a pole at the creek.

  Cussin' Creek was where us boys usually fished when an hour or two was all we had between chores. It wasn't far. Just a piece down the railroad tracks near Mr. Son Black's farm. Our train was a branch line of the Southern Railroad, which ran north from Athens through Cold Sassy, Commerce, and Maysville, connecting at Lula Junction with the Airline Railroad, which went on to Atlanta and Charlotte. I would get on the tracks at the depot just past the Cold Sassy tree.

  That tree was close to a hundred feet tall and the only sassafras still left of the big grove our town was named for. On a bright fall day when the sun lit up its scarlet leaves, you never saw anything to equal it. People would ride the train to Cold Sassy just to look. Usually they'd read the plaque that was nailed to its trunk: "Sassafras: family Lauraceae, genus Sassafras, species S. albidum. Note how the leaves vary in shape on the same twig, some having no lobes, some two or three." Considering the number of train travelers we had, I thought the plaque ought to tell how unusual tall the tree was and something about how Cold Sassy got its name.

  We used to have another big sassafras tree, which stood next to this one and had a knothole where bluebirds nested. Us boys used to rob the nest of its bluish-white eggs and blow out the insides. The railroad had taken that sassafras down some years earlier to make room for a bigger depot platform.

  I saw Mr. Angus Tuttle out there on the platform now, but he didn't see me. He was too busy arguing with a fat old farmer in overalls. Like all depot agents, Mr. Tuttle was cow coroner for the railroad, so I guessed right off that this was the farmer whose cow and mule got killed yesterday. Death by train isn't unusual out in the country. Farmers don't keep their livestock tied or pastured up like we do in town. I gathered from the argument, which was getting pretty loud, that the farmer was mad about the amount Mr. Tuttle had offered to settle the claim against the railroad. I could still hear those two fussing after I passed the foundry, but then everything got drowned out as the 1.10 from Athens approached.

  Stepping off the tracks to let it pass, I watched as the engine screeched and ground to a halt at the depot, belching smoke and steam. Back on the tracks and heading toward open country, I had a thought. "T.R., hot day like this, ain't no fish go'n bite at Cussin' Creek." I remembered then that Queenie's husband, big Loomis, said they were biting real good now under the trestle at Blind Tillie Creek.

  There were hazards. The shortest way to get there was to follow the tracks in the opposite direction, which would not only take me back past the depot but also past our house and Grandpa's store, where I might be seen. Also, I'd have to go through Mill Town.

  I had walked through Mill Town plenty of times, but never by myself.

  I was about to call it a dern fool idea when it came to mind I might see Lightfoot McLendon. I hadn't laid eyes on her since school let out for the summer. Whistling to T.R., I turned and headed back—past the foundry, past Grandpa's house, past the Cold Sassy tree and the depot, past our house, which I detoured around, and on toward the hotel and the block of stores.

  Walking along, I wondered about Grandpa and Miss Love. When would they get back? Would she come in and work on her hats, or would Grandpa drop her off at his house so she could sweep up some and cook his supper? Or since he was used to eating supper at Aunt Loma's, would they both go over there tonight?

  I wondered if an old man who just buried his wife would take his bride on a wedding trip. I decided he wouldn't. Not just because of being stingy but also because, at fifty-nine, Grandpa had his mind on the store and not on what Queenie called "de sweet'nin' on de gingercake."

  Well, right now my problem was not Grandpa and Miss Love but how I would get past the batch of stores without Papa and them seeing me, or old Crazy Tatum, who always sat in a rocking chair by the door to keep people out of his store. He put the chair just inside if it was cold, and out on the sidewalk if it was summer. If it looked like you might try to come in, he'd flap his arms like a bird and leap around, hollering and whooping. I knew if he went to whooping at me, Papa might chance to look out the store window and wonder why I wasn't weeding the garden like he said to.

  I had figured on going behind the brick stores till I was clear of them, but when I saw the i: 10 leave the depot, headed towards us on its way to Lula, I whistled to T.R. and got off the tracks on the South Main side. Seeing me, the engineer put an arm big as a leg of mutton out the window and waved.

  Since the store was across the tracks on North Main, we were hidden behind the moving boxcars, and I decided to keep on walking. The train was so long that before all of it passed us we were beyond the stores, the Confederate monument, the livery stable, the tanyard, the cotton gin, and Sleep's Ice and Coal, and nearly to Mill Town.

  The factory soon came in view and, just beyond it, the river that powered the machines. On a railroad siding off the main tracks, men in linty overalls were loading big pasteboard boxes full of cotton thread onto a freight car. At a huge square opening in the factory wall, other men were taking bales of cotton off of a wagon. I recognized old Charlie Rowley up there on the driver's bench of the wagon. Old Charlie and his mule were both string-halted, each having a tight ligament in the leg that made him limp. But that didn't keep them from hauling for Grandpa's big warehouse—delivering to the mill or depot when farmers who stored their cotton with us finally sold it.

  Charlie saw me and waved, and I waved back. Too late, I realized if he saw Papa later he might chance to mention seeing me on the train tracks going through Mill Town.

  Hurrying by the factory, I came to where the mill hands lived in close-together little shotgun houses—three rooms in a row, like long boxes, with public wells and privies that served two or three houses each.

  Cold Sassy was proud of its cotton mill, just as it was proud of the trains coming through. "Get you a railroad" and "Get you a cotton mill" was what big businessmen in Atlanta advised any town that wanted to grow. Having both, we were bound to grow, but Grandpa said he didn't see how the population could change any. "Ever time a baby's born, some boy joins the Navy." Still, Cold Sassy was considered up-and-coming. And like I said, already folks were talking about changing its name to something less countrified, the way Jugtown had been renamed Winder, and Garden Valley was now Pendergrass, and just four years ago Harmony Grove became Commerce—all of which, to my mind and Grandpa's, were awful improvements.

  Our mill houses were a long sight better than in lots of places, but they looked more like repeating blobs of white than homes. There weren't any trees. No shrubbery. Families sat crowded on the hot little porches, cotton lint from twelve hours in the mill still clinging to their hair and overalls and dresses. I guessed they were night workers who hadn't gone to bed yet. Who could go to bed in those little houses on a hot day in July?

  I kept glancing at the blank, stony, pinched faces of the men and women staring at me from steps and doorways, and at the children, all white-headed just like you see them in the Appalachians. They stared at me with sullen, mean eyes, like I was a strange animal. But whenever I looked right at them, their gaze dropped to the ground.


  Mill Town was watching the Town Boy pass.

  Nervous, I hurried my steps on the crossties. And T.R., who'd been running ahead like a brown and white flash, now walked stiff-legged close beside me, growling at any bony mangy dog that slunk too near. I went from hoping I'd see Lightfoot to hoping I wouldn't. It was one thing to like her at school and nobody know it. Here in Mill Town on my crosstie stage, folks would suspicion her if they saw me acting friendly. Also, I knew I'd be embarrassed if she was sweaty and lintheaded from the factory or if, Lord forbid, I saw her coming out of a privy.

  I decided it was a lot harder to walk through Mill Town than to have our school cluttered up with snot-nosed children who had cooties and the itch, and who at dinnertime stayed at school to eat biscuits and syrup, making us town children feel guilty for going home to a big hot dinner. The mill boys were always picking fights with town boys—tripping us up or calling us names. Of course we did our share of tripping and worse. But it was our dern school, for gosh sake.

  Before Lightfoot, I had a healthy disrespect for all mill children. Since Lightfoot, just being around them was like getting fussed at for wearing shoes in winter and having a cow and a family cook.

  Lightfoot wasn't like the other mill children. Wasn't like any girl I ever knew, for that matter. Wasn't silly, wasn't always twiddling her plaits, didn't tattle or gossip, didn't hit boys over the head with books or scrape the back of your neck with a sweetgum burr when you weren't looking. She was quiet and sweet and smart. Ragged, of course, but real clean, and thin without having the bony-faced, sunk-eyed look of mill children who've been hungry all their lives. Lightfoot had what I thought of as the fresh free look of the hills on her.

  The way I got to really know her, I had to stay after school one day for flipping spitballs, and she was staying late so Miss Neppie could help her catch up. This was back in January, soon after she came to Cold Sassy from the foothills of the Blue Ridge. At some point, when Miss Neppie went to Mr. McCall's office, I asked Lightfoot how come she left the mountains. "My mama always wanted us to move to Cold Sassy," she said. "My mama she had the TB, you know. Last summer, jest fore she passed, she wrote her brother in Mill Town and he said we was more'n welcome to stay with them. Mama kept sayin' Pa would have steady work in the mill and I could git me a good education and amount to something."

  The girl didn't seem to have heard yet that nobody in Mill Town ever amounted to anything.

  "So after the fall crop come in, my daddy he sold his plowin' steer and his piece a-land, and we caught the train to Cold Sassy."

  "You got any brothers and sisters in the mountains?" I asked.

  "Yeah, lots of'm. But they all married or dead, one."

  As T.R. and I walked the railroad tracks past the sweaty, dirty, hostile faces of Mill Town, I couldn't help wondering if a summer of slaving at the spindles would take away Lightfoot's hopes—and my notion that she walked in a cloud of fresh mountain air. Fixing my eyes on the repeating crossties, I walked fast. And even faster as it dawned on me just how much I didn't want to see Lightfoot McLendon with lint in her hair.

  I also didn't want to see Hosie Roach, a snot-nosed twenty-one-year-old mill boy in my class who stunk like a polecat and had tow-colored hair so thick and tangled it looked like a cootie stable. Hosie wasn't big as me, but whenever we had a fight—about once a week—he usually won. Gosh, what if he and a bunch of other mill boys ganged up on me.

  Getting beat to a pulp might have been better than what happened later at the trestle. But of course I didn't know it at the time, so it was a grand relief when my dog and I got past all chance of seeing Hosie or Lightfoot, either one.

  Once we were out in the country, we had a high old time. The dog romped through the daisies and weeds and tall grasses growing along the tracks. He scared up rabbits, barked at terrapins, caught gnats and flies in his mouth, and every few minutes looked back to be sure I was still coming along behind. Two bobwhites scooted across the tracks right in front of us, heads up and backs straight as tin soldiers', but they flushed before T.R. could point.

  That dog must of wet every black-eyed Susan and every head of white Queen Anne's lace we passed. I never saw such a dog for doing Number One. Grandpa called it the sweet-pee trick. I know that's how dogs stake out territory and also how they find their way home, but looks like T.R. would know by now that all we had to do to go home was turn around and follow the train tracks.

  Two or three times he stopped and stared back like he thought somebody was coming behind us. But then he would lower his head for a new scent and run ahead.

  We saw a few mill people near the tracks, picking blackberries into lard buckets, and a whole family of colored people. The Negroes smiled and waved and held up their buckets for me to see. The mill people didn't.

  It was hot, good gosh. My straw hat shaded my eyes, but that was all in the world good it did. "I guess I got about two hours," I muttered out loud. I knew the southbound train would cross the trestle over Blind Tillie Creek about when I ought to head home to milk.

  You couldn't exactly tell time by that train, but it would be close enough. It always came back through Cold Sassy with a load of lumber from the sawmill at Lula, bound for the lumberyard in Athens, and usually there were some passenger cars carrying folks who'd been to Atlanta. In the fall there were always cotton buyers, and usually four or five drummers who would set up their merchandise in a hotel room, stay a few days, then move on to another little town. Grandpa called them "Knights of the Grip." When Mama and Aunt Loma were young, he never let them hang around the depot. Drummers liked to flirt, were fresh-shaved, and wore suits, patent leather shoes, and big smiles. Girls always liked them.

  Less than a mile past Mill Town, I rounded a bend and saw the train trestle up ahead, marching through the air high above the wooded gorge where Blind Tillie Creek ran. Just before we got to the trestle I whistled for my dog and went slipping and sliding down a red-dirt path, past dusty briar bushes that reached out to scratch me as I ate my fill of blackberries.

  It was a sight cooler by the creek than up there on the tracks. I cut me a pole and was soon perched on a stump, fishing and eating fried chicken. Later I cut a blackgum twig to chew on and settled myself comfortable on the ground with the stump for a back rest.

  It was nice and peaceful there. Watching the shallow water splash and churn over rocks, I almost forgot how mad I was at Mama for making me stay in mourning, how mad I was at her and Aunt Loma for fussing about Grandpa marrying when he clearly needed a housekeeper, and how mad I was at him and Miss Love for not caring how the family felt. But then I got mad at Papa. Here I was at last—fishing—and I couldn't enjoy it for feeling guilty.

  I had sense enough to know my daddy really needed me to be home working the garden. But I wished he knew what it felt like to have fun. All Papa had ever done was work. Before he was knee-high to a gnat, his own daddy had him picking bugs off of cotton plants, and he was hoeing as soon as he knew the difference between a weed and a cotton stalk, and milking soon as his hands were big enough to squeeze a cow's tit. I bet he never in his life had sat in the shade of a train trestle holding a fishing pole and watching dragonflies walk on water.

  Grandpa Blakeslee bragged a lot about my daddy being such a dandy worker. I was proud he wasn't lazy like his own daddy, who spent the summer days on his porch swatting flies and even had him a pet hen to peck up the dead ones. Grandpa Tweedy always claimed he couldn't work. "My veins is too small," he'd say. "My blood jest cain't git th'ew fast enough to let me do much." Naturally he had a beard. He was too lazy to shave. He was even too lazy and self-satisfied to go anywhere, except to preaching over at Hebron or to Cold Sassy to sell his cotton. Wasn't ever on a train but once, when he went to Dr. Mozely's funeral in Athens. All of us went, but first Grandpa Tweedy and my daddy had to decide if it was all right to ride that train. Being Sunday, it might be a sin.

  Like Grandpa Tweedy, Papa worried all the time about sin on Sunday. He never l
et us read anything but the Bible and the Christian Observer on the Sabbath, and once talked Mr. Tuttle into locking up everybody's Sunday Atlanta papers at the depot till Monday morning. The fact that Cold Sassy put up with that for a month or more shows how much they respected my father. I respected him, too, as I said before. But I wished he knew what it felt like to need to go fishing.

  My bait was gone again. I wasn't going to catch anything here. It was too hot and the creek too low. Might as well go home and get to work. But glancing around, I saw a mess of logs and brush on the other side and remembered the deep hole there. If any fish were in Blind Tillie Creek, that's where I'd catch them. I was just fixing to get up and wade across when I chanced to look up at the train trestle.

  I had walked trestles plenty of times. I used to play on one out in Banks County with Cudn Doodle and them. But I'd never been on Blind Tillie Trestle. From where I sat, leaning against my tree stump and looking up, it seemed higher than a Ferris wheel. Higher even than the new Century Building in Atlanta, and it spanned a wide, deep gorge.

  Miss Bertha at school had told us about the si-renes—the mermaids who used to sing to Greek sailors and they'd go off course to follow. Looking at that trestle, I felt like I was being sung to. Or maybe it was more like when the fire bells clang on Cold Sassy's horse-drawn fire engine and you just got to go chasing after it to where the smoke is billowing up.

  That's how Blind Tillie Trestle called to me that day.

  The longer I stared up at it and the blue sky and fleecy clouds beyond, the more it seemed like a bridge across the world. I wanted to see how things looked from up there. I don't even remember winding the fishing line around my pole, but all of a sudden I was clambering up the bank. Old T.R. raced me to the top and then barked at me till I got up there.