by James Still
River of Earth was published February 5, 1940. Time magazine called it “a work of art.” I was standing by a potbelly stove in a railroad station in Jackson, Kentucky, that frozen morning waiting for a train going north to connect with one heading south. The train was late. In walked a deputy sheriff, who warmed his hands a moment, then responded to a call from the door, “They need you across the road.” I followed, out of curiosity. The sheriff entered a building where commodities were being distributed and was shot dead.
The train came. I boarded and wrote a letter to Time to thank the magazine for the kind words and briefly stated what I had witnessed on this long-awaited occasion. Two weeks later I entered a barber shop in Florida and was handed a copy of Time to peruse while I waited. Leading the “Letter” section was my message bearing the heading, “Bloody Breathitt.” A touchy designation then as now. Breathitt County is the only one in Kentucky where nobody was drafted during World War I. Volunteers filled their quota. Stopping by Jackson on the way home to access the damage, I learned that citizens in high office were enraged and that it would be wise to cool my heels elsewhere. My guilt was that I had given a local matter national attention.
Three years went by. A great deal was happening out in the world, but nothing was happening to us. World War II was declared, and I was drafted among the first in Knott County. My age would have been a factor elsewhere. They were getting rid of the jailbirds, the riffraff, and those without families to protest. I belonged to the latter category. A recent operation to remove a bronchial cleft cyst would have given me an “out” had I chosen to call attention to it. The average age of the men in my squadron was twenty-two. I was thirty-six years old and subject to the same physical demands, no quarter granted.
I traveled off to Fort Thomas, where my rating on the AGCT test allowed me to choose the Army Air Force. Shipped out to San Antonio, I baked in the Texas sun for six months, then was staged at Fort Dix, before being sent off for the invasion of North Africa via New York, Rio de Janeiro, and Cape Town. My 99-percent Texas-born outfit, the 8th Air Depot Group, loaded onto barges on the New Jersey shore at night and headed for the SS Aquitania somewhere beyond. As we pushed off, the men began to sing a bawdy song—a not uncommon practice. Running without lights, we entered New York harbor. The towers of Manhattan were lost in mist. Suddenly the mist parted, and there, bathed in moonlight, stood the Statue of Liberty, the base hidden, floating in air as it were. The singing stopped, and only the breathing of hundreds of men and the slapping of waves against the hull could be heard. It was a solemn moment. With hand in air Miss Liberty seemed to be waving farewell. For some of the men it was their last view of America forever. The singing began again, and the song this time was “Shall We Gather at the River.”
There were some ten thousand of us on the Aquitania, which had served in World War I at Gallipoli and had been slated to be broken up when war erupted. Before us was a journey of twenty-six days to Cape Town. We poked along, changing directions every six minutes to thwart submarines, putting into Rio for a week, going in circles for days as we neared Cape Town until destroyers were sent to lead us in. The harbormaster at Cape Town turned out to be a German spy, which accounted for the sinkings of numerous merchant vessels in the area. What a prize we would have made, ten thousand putrid men who hadn’t bathed for nearly a month. Good for an iron cross.
We transhipped to the Antenor after a spell at Palls Moor, then joined a fleet of ships heading north, until we made a landing at Freetown, Sierra Leone. For an unforgettable hour we awaited the signal to board the landing craft, each of us a walking arsenal. The order rang out, “Let’s go, men!” We were excited but, I think, not afraid. We went. We hit the beach, but nobody was there. We had half-expected the Vichy French. We had no inkling of the vast movement of men investing that part of Africa that day. I subsequently learned that we had liberated Graham Greene, the novelist, who was serving with British intelligence and who was in hiding at Freetown.
My outfit settled down at Accra, Gold Coast Colony (now Ghana), our base for more than two years. I traveled to Egypt, to Palestine (Israel), and to Eritrea where I picked up a dysentery I was long in overcoming. I also survived a plane crash in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and endured two cases of blackwater fever, an often fatal form of malaria. In the Ashanti kingdom I collected some pre-Columbian counterweights made of hand-smelted ore and shaped by the “lost wax” method.
It is said that every soldier is glad to come home but that he comes home angry. I came back disoriented. For months I sat in the door of my log house and could not arouse interest in the things I had done before. Gradually I adjusted and again joined the staff of the Hindman Settlement School, with a modest salary. Next, I taught for ten years at Morehead State University, then resigned and returned to Knott County. Since 1970 I’ve spent fourteen winters in Central America pursuing an interest in Mayan civilization, and I’ve taken five trips to Europe to visit World War I battlefields.
I continue to have an irremovable reputation of being a hermit, but people have always fascinated me. For example, my neighbor across the creek from my log house is already up and busy with his saw and hammer, despite it being Sunday; despite his having worked in the mines all the other six days of the week, often in water shoe-mouth deep, as he tells me; and despite the fact that there is not one plank requiring a saw or a nail needing to be driven. He must be doing something, creating something, just as I must, propped up here against pillows on my four-post walnut bed, a creation of Jethro Amburgey, the dulcimer maker.
Today I find I’ve written seven pages in a notebook—hardly any page relating in subject to any other. These pages are looking toward books or manuscripts partially written that I will never complete given my age and biological life span. The lady who once asked me, “Do you do your own writing?” and to whom I replied, “No, I have seven dwarves,” has lately inquired, “Where do you get your ideas?” For me, ideas are hanging like pears from limbs, like gourds from fences. Ideas rise up like birds from cover. They spring from reports in the Troublesome Creek Times, from a remark in a country store, from a happening.
From childhood I’ve been a reader, when there was anything to read, and I suppose I’ve read an average of three hours a day for more than half a century. My reading jaunts include books on the Himalayas, the South Pacific, the American Civil War, World War I, Mayan civilization, and the entire corpus of many an author. Curiosity is like an itch that needs scratching.
I’m often asked, “Who influenced you to write?” Certainly it wasn’t handed down in the family, and I can’t think of an author I wish to emulate, though I have admired the works of many. I was already scribbling before the great books came into my hands. As an English observer of Appalachian folk in Harlan County, Kentucky, once said, “Not knowing the right way to do things, they did things their way.” I did encounter the novels of Thomas Hardy during college days, and the fact that I’ve always written about the common man may have been sparked by him. The only class I ever cut was when I was deep into Far From the Madding Crowd and could not put the book down. In college, the most memorable book I read was Alphonse Daudet’s Le Petit Chose, in French. I must grant some credit to a decade of issues of the Atlantic that I came upon during the late 1920s. Otto Jespersen’s The Philosophy of Grammar directed me toward “living language” as opposed to formal language. But I am more an autodidact than a classroom scholar.
“How did you avoid ‘hillbilly’ writing?” is another question I frequently hear. Those who ask that question have in mind the stereotypical representation of mountain people and their dialectical speech as rendered by several authors of fiction in the past. My answer is that I was hardly aware of those authors; I didn’t have access to their books. My experience was with the folk themselves. Dialect of any sort on a printed page has always bothered me. Peculiar spellings can’t account for the tone of voice, the body language, or the intent behind the statement. My aim is to invoke speech, to try to get
the true sound of it to happen in the reader’s head. Aberrant spelling rarely accomplishes that. I try to preserve the “voice” of the speaker.
I answered a set of down-to-earth questions at Carmus Combs’ store the other day. A fellow inquired, “How many years have you lived amongst us?”
“More than half a century.”
“You’re the last ’possum up the tree. Everybody your age when you come here is dead. Hain’t that so?”
“I thought they’d live forever.”
“What’s your notion about dying?”
“Death is as natural as sleep,” I said, quoting Benjamin Franklin. “We will arise refreshed in the morning.”
The Poems
Dreams
Daring to dream of that which cannot be,
I have plucked my roots from earthly ways
For a cloisonne vase of unreality,
And a cup of water for my share of days.
What can my sorrows be
For having dreamed gloriously
Life’s short hour?
Burned Tree
I am a lifeless reminder
Of limitless forest
That has passed away.
I was the home of a million green leaves,
A shelter for creatures of the earth,
A home for the songbirds,
And a drinker of waters to curb the floods
In springtime.
I am a naked reminder
Of raging forest fires
That have long since grown cold.
I am a timid skeleton of healthy green boughs.
My blackened body is a memorial
To the careless camper.
I raise my seared branches to the sky
In silent condemnation.
Fallow Years
Man is not worthy like our Mother Earth.
Mortals may furrows turn from sun to sun,
Tilling fecund land as fair seasons run,
And to good grain and stalwart sons give birth,
Bearing each stony sorrow, each blind mirth,
As Earth bears shallow soil on hilltops dun,
Frost, flood, and plague, meeting them one by one,
Spinning the years as flaxen thread is spun.
But Mother Earth is far more faithful still
Than man who in old age has fallow years
To rest his hands, to ruminate on fears
Of ending death; Earth cannot hope to fill
The span of her eternity, nor spill
Her life blood: Earth has only gentle tears.
The Bright Road
This is the bright road to the mountain top
Beset with shadows and with paths astray,
By dangerous crag, by cliff’s sudden drop
Into eternity. This is the way
That man might climb upon the verdant sod
And find among the peaks the peace of God.
On this long road man needs an iron-bound will,
A purpose clear that strengthens every hour,
A hand to help the weak o’er steepening hill
And heart to cheer the sad through darkening shower.
This is the bright road youth must climb with care
To gain the top and its good blessings share.
Artifacts
With swollen tongues of a perishing wilderness
He has spoken the final and tortured words
In the forest slain, over the hills disturbed
And violated. And the words were heavy
With old hatred, with old anger stirred newly;
They were the color of fire in dry sedge,
And loud with defeat.
“We are undone. The mountains crumble
Beneath our feet. Our wave of earth subsides.
A little time and man shall stride no more,
His thighs having wasted with little using.
We are the bones for distant questioning.”
This was his parable, and it was spoken
Upon a mountainside.
Answer
This is the answer to all centuries
That spawn new life and grind it into dust.
This is the solved equation of the heart
Bound in arrogance between fettering rust
And pure white rage of Spring’s late snow
When sap is high, when tender buds first start.
There are no final lines to mark the end
Of stern design in earth’s geometry.
Firm angles crash, true circles wilt and fail
Before the whirling mass of all infinity.
Love that has paled and died in weary hope
Will rise from dust to reenact the tale.
Let This Hill Rest
Let this hill rest . . .
Let the roots crawl into this failing earth,
Let the leaf fall, let day descend
On untilled slopes. Let the oak’s girth
Strain and increase, vine drown the rock
And paling blossoms flow in creeping wind.
Let my heart rest this purple hour
With slow wandering in dull passages of breath,
In unwoven air, in sleep withdrawn from death,
And voiceless span the mountain’s crumbling tower.
Let me lie here unstirred, unwaked and still,
Let my heart lean against this fallow hill.
Lambs
They have come with Spring, with the tender leaves
And the birds’ first cry in the upland wood;
They are born to April, to lean-sheared ewes,
To grass thawed brightly where the hillside weaves
The awl-shaped buds slow-breaking, and the breath
Of Spring hung frailly with the cold of death.
On crooked legs the lambs go up the hills
With early day, with light’s first pointed thrust
Where earth burns greenly with a luscious fire
And fog drains narrowly into splintered rills.
They are the first sure trumpets at Winter’s cease,
The first woolly blooms, the sky’s first fleece.
Swift Were Their Feet
Father of his flock he watched the children grow
Out of the cradle he had hewn and shaped
With patient hands; he watched their bright eyes,
Small eager throats, their bodies in sleep breathe slow
And rise again to morning with unbroken ties
Of day on day, of quartered light that spills
Between the valley’s bosom and the farthest skies.
Swift were their feet among the brittle nubbin horns
Of budded leaves sun-broken on the hills.
Then they were gone into their own brave ways,
And the years hung empty as a perished sand
With never a quickened voice, never sudden tears,
But wingless mist hung darkly in remembering eyes.
When the last pillow cupped his head, and all his fears
Were flown as robins to some feathered land,
He was the child with querulous hands and face
And they in wisdom gathered to a hallowed place.
Wilderness
Need the words unspoken be said here
Under the red maples, in a vale of trees
Piercing the clay and rancid sodden leaves
Dyed with madder?
Or under the green cedars
On the hill’s saddle?
Let not a word fall on pale strawberry blossoms
Beneath the lynn tree’s vagrant whispering,
Or a syllable bleed on spikes of cinnamon fern,—
All speech made here will know an early withering.
In the cool stillness where shadow-flowers dance
Lean poplars will flaunt all thoughts that burn
Into futile words within a haughty wilderness.
All beauty here that trudges hills and skies
Is cl
othed in silence and in silence dies.
Dulcimer
The dulcimer sings from fretted maple throat
Of the doe’s swift poise, the fox’s fleeting step
And music of hounds upon the outward slope
Stirring the night, drumming the ridge-strewn way,
The anvil’s strength . . .
and the silence after
That aches and cries unhushed into the day.
From the dulcimer’s breast sound hunting horns
Strong as clenched hands upon the edge of death,
The creak of saddle-bags, of oxen yoke and thongs,
Wild turkey’s treble, dark sudden flight of crows,
Of unshod hoofs . . .
and the stillness after,
Bitter as salt drenching the tongue of pain:
And of the lambs crying, breath of the lark,
Long drinks from piggins hard against the lips;
And with hoarse singing, raw as hickory shagbark,
The foal’s anxiety is woven with the straining wedge
And the wasp’s anger . . .
and the quiet after
For the carver of maple on a keen blade’s edge.
Horse Swapping
Splintery as legs of spring foals the willows bend
