Three Novellas

by Sandra Shwayder Sanchez

III

  Robert

  The mountain people were loyally united against outsiders: folks from the cities who came looking for cheap land, folks from the towns who had gone out into the world and come back with education as doctors, lawyers, bankers, politicians; bottomland farmers with indoor plumbing and barns all painted white and green. It was as though the mountains and trees had whispered secrets to these people. The secret whisperings might be sheer gibberish or might be some wisdom they failed to comprehend, but in any case they felt chosen and were proud of these secrets, whatever they might perceive them to be, and they looked down upon the city folks, the rich folks, the uninitiated ones, and treated them at best with unsubtle but confusing mockery or, worse, with intent and ingenious malice… Sara’s journal

  Robert Awkman was strange. He had grown up in Monroe County as had his mother and her mother before her. He had always been a bookish boy with fantasies that involved faraway places and important people he read about in the magazines at the laundromat in town. Other young people made fun of him and called him “Awkward Awkman” behind his back. To his face, very few of them said anything at all. He kept all the covers of Time magazine and talked about the faces on those covers as if he knew the folks personally. Those fantasies were his company.

  Robert was slightly taller than average and very thin, didn’t look to be as strong as he was, but he could lift heavy boulders by himself, and some people said they wouldn’t want to run into Robert on the road after dark. During the last war Robert had walked all the way into Charleston to sign up but was rejected and walked all the way back again not stopping for night, not stopping for anything. He bragged on this accomplishment when other men told war stories.

  Robert walked everywhere, ignoring rain, the heat, just plodding along and he worked for $2 an hour for anyone who needed some help putting up fences, building a barn, doing the work of two men. Robert never left home but took care of his old mother,who had been senile forever. It was said that Robert was hit by lightning when he was young while he was out cutting wood and it made him crazy, but others said he was always crazy. He told long involved stories about South American “powers” meeting in Jerry Smithson’s cabin to plot the takeover of the United States of America or how the cigarette company that took an advertising photo of the waterfall in Back Valley then dynamited the waterfall, causing it to disappear so their picture couldn’t be duplicated. He also talked about the young woman who sat up top the waterfall on the rocks smoking her cigarette (“You can take the girl out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the girl”).

  Robert got real strange when talking about women, especially good-looking city women. And he really liked getting that look of shock on some woman’s face when she walked into a conversation among the men and he would suddenly break out into obscenities. Robert liked to think that he could control people, tell them things that would make them angry at each other, start feuds, and then watch what happened. He snuck around a lot too. No one could hear Robert if he didn’t want to be heard. He observed everyone in the county at some time or other, watching to see what intrigues he could uncover, or those hippy types making love out of doors or Henry counting his money. And he liked to walk long distances and sleep out on the ground so that he might be in Monroe County one day and Greenbriar the next and go all the way to Hinton, maybe hitch a ride to Huntington, before he’d head back, on foot, to Gap Mills. He liked the feeling that the whole state was his territory. Robert was a man to be reckoned with and to think otherwise was foolish.

  The first time Sara met Robert was shortly after she had set up her camp for her summer of study: a sleeping tent under a shelter of hemlock trees and trenched around to keep rainwater from flowing beneath it, a desk she had made of rough boards across tree stumps she had rolled into place and evened out with wedges of flat stones from the river, a dining table that was nothing more than a telephone cable spool and a couple of folding canvas chairs that sat low to the ground designed for the beach. Over the work area she had hung a waterproof tarp tied taut at the four corners by twine to four tall trees and peaked in the middle by a post she dug into the ground and pushed up under the tarp to form a kind of roof from which rainwater would drip instead of pooling in the middle. She kept her food and cooking supplies and her books in the cab of the truck until she required them and she did all her writing on a yellow pad with yellow pencils. She had found a spot for the campground near the river. It was private land and she had permission from the owner who had once been a student of her advisor in the anthropology department. It was close to the holler where she’d once lived.

  Sara had been hiking in the woods on the other side of the creek away from the road and came back to find a skinny, funny-looking guy paging through the book she had left on the desk: the Bateson book. Her first impulse was to laugh: he looked like the figure of Ichabod Crane she’d once seen in an animated version of the tale of the Headless Horseman. But she didn’t laugh and as she came closer she felt wary as if Robert exuded some scent of malice.

  “Hello. I’m Sara Brindisi, a guest of the Weavers?” As the stranger continued to ignore her presence, her statement took on the uplifted ending of a question, and she reproached herself for what she considered a sign of weakness. She should simply have asked this person who the hell he was and what was he doing there among her things.

  “Robert Awkman at your service,” he mumbled without looking up. He didn’t look up at her until she had stationed herself right across the narrow “desk” from him. Then he looked up and offered her the book at the same time.

  “Interesting book you have here. I’d like to borrow it sometime.”

  “Well, perhaps the local library will order it for you. I’m working on a project and I need to consult it from time to time and then return it to the professor who lent it to me. If it were my own, I’d be happy to let you borrow it, but it isn’t mine. You understand?” Once again Sara started asking questions when it was the stranger who should have been explaining himself. After a while he did, with far more detail than Sara would have liked.

  “You the lady anthropologist come to study us hillbillies? I know most everyone around these parts and you got any questions about anyone I can tell you more than you’d want to know probably, more than they would tell you about themselves, I’m sure. Most people around these parts have more secrets than stories if you know what I mean. I can help you get to the bottom of things.”

  “Well, I’m not here to snoop on anyone. I’m writing a paper, maybe eventually a book, about Appalachian culture. I figure people are writing books about cultures in India and Africa and Russia and Greece, all over the world, you know, and here we have a very interesting culture right here in our own mountains and I wanted to write about it. So I probably will want to interview you, Mr. Awkman, but it wouldn’t be about other people’s secrets. It would be about your own ancestors and family traditions first, then later about community matters, not personal secrets. I think we have to respect those, don’t you?” She was being condescending and she knew it, but she wasn’t sure how to react to this sneaky, scary man.

  “Why you want to write about us? Most folks think we’re stupid and dull. Leastways that’s what I think most people think.”

  “Not at all, Mr. Awkman. Rural ways of life are dying out as more people go to the cities and the cities grow and build over land that was once rural. I think there are truths about being human that people who live old-fashioned lives in rural areas can teach the rest of us that are very important, about survival for instance.”

  “Well, if our way of life is dying out, we can’t be such hotshot experts at survival can we? No, I think you’d have a more interesting book if you just let me tell you the secrets: kind of a ‘rural’ Peyton Place, know what I mean? More money in it anyway, make you a movie maybe. I could be your ‘consultant’…well, I see I am wasting your time. You have work to do. Maybe you could write dow
n the name of that book for me with the publisher and all and I’ll get the librarian in Alderson to order it for me. I know she hasn’t got it but she can order it. They’ll order books from all over the 48 continental United States for you if you ask. They’re so happy to know anyone wants to read cuz most people in these parts don’t.”

  Since he had already half turned to go, Sara didn’t encourage him. She had already introduced herself to the local postmistress who understood what she was doing here and she thought maybe she’d ask that lady about this guy. She would have been curious and even intrigued but for the tone of sarcasm that permeated his every word, even the announcement of his name, as if even his name was some kind of obscene joke. Sara looked down after Robert was gone from view and noticed he had left the book open to where he’d been reading:

  In the business of head-hunting, the masculine ethos no doubt reached its most complete expression; and though at the present time the ethos of head-hunting cannot be satisfactorily observed, there is enough left of the old system to give the investigator some impression of what that system implied. Lacking observations of actual behavior my description must however be based on native accounts. The emphasis here was not on courage; no better coup was scored for a kill which had entailed special hardship or bravery. It was as good to kill a woman as a man and as good to kill by stealth as in open fight. An example will serve to illustrate this set of attitudes: In a raid on one of the neighboring bush villages a woman was killed and her daughter was taken by the killer (Malikindjin) and brought back to Kankanamun. He took her to his house, where, for a while he hid her, thinking of adopting her into his household. But she did not remain there. He took her to the ceremonial house and a discussion arose as to her fate. She pleaded that she should be pitied: “you are not my enemies; you should pity me; later I will marry in this village.” One of the young men, Avuran-mali, son of her captor, cut into this discussion, and in a friendly way invited her to come down to the gardens to get some sugarcane. Accordingly he and the girl went down to the gardens together with one or two of the younger boys, among them my informant, Tshava, who was then a small boy. On arriving there, Avuran-mali speared her. (The duty of cleaning the skull fell to Tshava. An enemy skull must never be touched, and Tshava had some difficulty in detaching a ligament. He therefore discarded the tongs, seized the end of the ligament in his teeth and pulled at it. His father saw him and was very shocked; but Tshava said to me: “that silly old man! How was I to know?” an attitude towards taboos which is not uncommon among the Iatmul.) supra pp. 138-139