Hill Towns (2 page)

I did not hear the truck coming. I did not hear it hit them.

I only heard, an instant later, the squall of brakes and Leon Crouch shouting over and over, “Holy shit! Oh, holy shitfire Jesus
Lord
!”

And then, when he found me in the back seat of the Nash,

“God
damn
those trashy fuckers! Right in front of their baby!”

It was as good an epitaph as any for Rosellen and Cornelius Compton in the eyes of the Mountain, and it was most assuredly the start of a consensus. After that, most of the tears shed for them were, at least in part, tears of embarrassed laughter. Only mine and perhaps my grandparents’ were pure, and even mine were inward.

HILL TOWNS / 7

Trinity College crowns the flat summit of Morgan’s Mountain in south Tennessee like a mortarboard or a forage cap, or perhaps a bishop’s miter, apt similes all. It was born just after the Civil War (referred to on the Mountain as the War for Southern Independence) expressly to serve the southern dioceses of the Episcopal Church in the Christian education of its young gentlemen. It was modeled, as perfectly as human frailty allowed, after the venerable Anglican colleges of England and held together during its hardscrabble early years by the unspent passion of a great many unemployed Confederate officers. Many southern bishops blessed it, and not a few came to teach there. Several still do. Widows of Confederate officers or Episcopal clergymen were its first housemothers. Early on, it became an indulgent little joke that “Trinity”

in the college’s case referred to God the Father, God the Son, and General Robert E. Lee.

Succeeding generations of Trinitarians have found no cause to scuttle the joke. God the Father and God the Son are still manifestly present in the mellow gray dimness of All Souls Chapel and Compton Seminary, and General Lee’s portrait, flanked by draped Confederate flags and crossed dress sabers, still hangs in Commons.

The education presided over by these eminences is unalterably classical liberal arts and generally first rate in spite of it, and for that reason many undergraduates are now drawn from all parts of the country and even the world. Very few these days come to be molded by God and Robert E. Lee for life and service in the vanished world of the Christian gentlemen’s South, and many new students come up the Mountain for the first

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time prepared to jeer. Even those of us whose permanent world it is often laugh at Trinity’s sheer hubris of intent and tradition; the “Trinity experience” no longer fits one to live anywhere but Trinity, it’s often said at faculty doings on the Mountain.

But those who remain do not wish to leave. And the young who enter laughing and stay to graduate almost always go out into the world off the Mountain taking with them the swish of invisible academic gowns and a set of near-chivalric values. There is enormous power in these old gray stones, cloistered away up here on Morgan’s Mountain. They bend reality and stop time. I do not wonder that Trinity produces so few successful junk bond salesmen and politicians. The daily subliminal infusions of honor are an effective lifelong purgative for a great many contemporary ambitions. I sometimes imagine that the last sound new graduates hear as they roll out under the stone arch that marks the southern-most boundary of the Domain, as we call it, is the triumphant laughter of long-dead bishops and generals.

Much of Trinity’s power lies in its sheer beauty. The Mountain and the village of Montview are almost phantasmagorical in their loveliness. There are to me no mountains on earth so beautiful as these. They are among the oldest in the world smoothed now to the curves of a sleeping woman’s body. They roll across the middle South in symmetrical soft, misted waves. Morgan’s Mountain sits a little apart from the rest, a last convulsion that marks the dying of the Appalachian chain. And green: green everywhere, always, all the greens of the entire earth, each to its own season. The top of Morgan’s Mountain is a globe of pure green swimming suspended in the thin, clear blue air of the southern highlands. It comes eventually to be the only

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air where permanent Trinitarians can thrive. We are unfit, I have always thought, to breathe other richer, ranker air for long.

That dreaming old beauty is the snare, of course. Those who do not need it do not stay. A high percentage of fresh-men and sophomores do not return. Some flunk out, but many simply bolt back to the rich, comforting stench of the world. Those who stay need bells in their ears, and plain-song, and countless angels dancing always on the heads of pins. And after all, the world is lucky that relatively few do stay; what would we do with all those elite young philosopher princelings if their numbers were legion? Where would we fit all those languorous, learned young Anglophiles?

But the ones who do stay…ah the old mossy stones and the flying dark gowns and the ranked pennons in chapel looking for all the world like medieval banners, and the slow turn of the burnished seasons in the great hardwood forest, and the mists of autumn and the white snowfall of spring dogwoods and the world spread out at one’s feet all around off the Mountain, and the bitter-sweet smoke of wood fires and the drunkenness of poetry and mathematics and the flow of bourbon and the night music of concerts and dances through new green leaves, and the delicately bawdy laughter of young girls and the sheen of their flesh and hair, and the special trembling awareness of cold dew and dawn breaking on monumental hangovers after you have talked all night of wonderful or terrible things and sung many songs and perhaps made out by the lake or on the Steep: these things are golden barbs in the flesh and will hold always. Trinity is eccentric and elitist and chauvinistic and innocent and arrogant and very, very particular, and it claims its own like a great gray raptor.

10 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

My grandfather Cash was a janitor there.

“What did that feel like?” Joe asked me when he learned that one grandfather used to clean the structure that bore the other’s name. Not for long; Papaw Cash refused to enter Compton Seminary with his mops and brooms once the Compton of it entered his family. Everyone at Trinity understood.

Joe was powerfully attracted to my family’s bizarre history.

He found none of it amusing and all of it profound. Joe was a born teacher of literature.

“It’s pure American tragedy,” he said, over and over. “It’s all of folklore and literature, really: the Montagues and the Capulets, the Medicis, most of Faulkner—”

“And the Hatfields and the McCoys, maybe?” I said. “Or the Jukes and the Kallikaks?”

I was in his senior Southern Literature seminar that winter.

It was how we met. I knew he knew the story of my provenance on the Mountain before he knew me; everyone at Trinity did. I had stopped minding long before. Such was Trinity’s ecclesiastical, liberal-arts predilection for wounded birds and fascination with its own redolently Gothic milieu that I was a campus favorite from the days I used to come to work with my grandfather Cash and sit docilely on the steps of whatever structure he was cleaning, Mamaw Cash being practically certifiable by then. Somehow I never felt an outsider in the Domain. Everyone knew and felt sorry for me, the strange little hybrid of gown and town. And I suppose I was an appealing child; I heard it often. I was slight and grave and long-limbed, with a cap of curls like a little Greek boy’s, only fair, and fine thin features. I looked for all the world like my father and still do, save for the very dark eyes that were my mother’s. Except for the fine dry lines around my eyes and

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mouth, I could pass now for a rather androgynous late teen.

My father had the same look in the photographs taken just before he died, and it is there in the portrait of my great-grandfather Compton, in the seminary. Unworldly and dreaming, patrician as an overbred collie. It has, I think, served all us Comptons well, even my poor father. It both enabled and excused him a great deal.

“What did it feel like?” I answered Joe when he first asked.

“To tell you the truth, it made me feel rather special. Everybody bent over backward to make me feel accepted, not to feel…singled out because my grandfather was a campus janitor, and not even the head honcho at that. I think I was pretty much Trinity’s poster child for a long time. Papaw wouldn’t even speak my father’s name by then, but I knew the name on the seminary was mine, and somehow I knew that half of me, anyway, was connected to the college in an important way. After a while Mrs. Pierce, the provost’s wife, put her foot down and said it was a disgrace for Bishop Compton’s great-granddaughter to sit on the steps with the mops and brooms all day, and she took me into her own house with her housekeeper. I pretty much grew up there weekdays; I went to the little Trinity kindergarten, and the faculty children came to play with me, and it got so I went to all the right little Mountain birthday parties and play groups and then to Montview Day. I know my Compton grandparents paid my tuition and probably kicked in a good bit more in those earliest days, but I think they must have sent it straight to the Pierces, or maybe there was a discreet little fund established at the school. The bequest came much later, after they died. I know if they’d sent money to my Cash grandparents’ house, Mamaw Cash would have given it all to her

12 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

church. She was practically handling snakes by that time.”

Joe’s eyes shone behind his rimless round glasses. More Faulkner; this was beyond his wildest dreams. I could practically see a monograph taking shape inside his long, elegant skull: “The Survival of the Gothic Tradition in the American Southern Highlands.”

“Too bad it all had such an ordinary happy ending,” I said.

He wouldn’t surrender so easily.

“That’s not the way I heard it,” he said. “I heard you went through a god-awful time with your Cash grandparents before they died. Christ, no wonder you don’t want to leave this place. It must seem like the only refuge you ever had.”

I didn’t bother to ask who had told him about the other side of my childhood, the side that prevailed when I went home each afternoon with Papaw Cash. Anyone could have.

It was part of the cherished Legend of Catherine Compton.

I heard much later that another professor, a pale young man in the music school who much admired the ballads of John Jacob Niles, had made up a folk song about me once while drunk on jug wine at a faculty party: “The Ballad of Cat Compton.” It amused me when I finally heard it, in my early thirties and safe in my stone house on the Steep overlooking the entire valley, with Joe and our daughter Lacey. But it would have embarrassed me no end if I had learned about it at the time. Back then I wanted only to put every vestige of my life in the dark vine-strangled shack on the other side of the Mountain behind me and melt into the body of Trinity.

Dark…dear Lord, the darkness around that house and in it! Not only the darkness of the enshrouding HILL TOWNS / 13

kudzu and creeper vines that finally came to hold the black weathered boards together; not only the darkness of the encircling pines and the wet gray lip of pure mountain granite that beetled over it, so that between trees and rock you never saw the sun or the blue of the sky unless you went outside and stood in the front yard. No, the darkness in the house of Burrell and Mattie Cash seeped from the very walls and canted floors; from the stained rag rugs and cracked linoleum and the few pieces of scarred old dark fumed oak furniture; from the black iron stove and the wash pot in the kitchen and the listing moss-slick outhouse in the pines behind; from the mean small fireplaces in the four rooms that lay cold and dank and empty except in the very dead of winter; from, it seemed to me, the very stuff of my grandparents’ shapeless lye-boiled clothing, to which my own clothing was nearly identical; from their dark closed faces and shuttered, black Cash eyes.

I never knew why my grandparents were so cold and angry; it was not entirely at my father, and at my mother’s shameful death with him on the chain bridge, for they were silent and angry even before that. I remember distinctly that I really feared going to their house when my parents were alive, and was always cold there, and finally my mother did not take me anymore. None of Rosellen Cash’s older brothers and sisters lived in their parents’ house that I can remember.

All of them had fled it as soon as they could find sustenance for themselves elsewhere. Three Cash aunts had married when they were sixteen and could legally do so and moved to the flatlands, where they raised what seemed to me entire phalanxes of dark, jeering Cash cousins. Two Cash uncles had also fled to the flats but did not marry and seemed to 14 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

spend most of their time raising hell. They were said by Papaw to be sorry and by Mamaw to be damned, and I did not see them at all, even after I went to live in their childhood home.

I think now that the darkness in that house—the metaphorical darkness, not the physical, which was entirely corpor-eal—had its genesis in the madness of my grandmother Mattie Cash. I believe it was that madness that I smelt when I was small, like a young animal smells hidden blood, and feared her house as if it had been a charnel house. And I think it is an apt measure of the terrible fear of randomness, of murdering chance, that was born in me when my parents died that I chose that house rather than the benign house of my Compton kin. Mattie Cash was obliquely mad then; an outlander might mistake it for simple mountain reclusiveness, the queerness of old ways, and perhaps a long skein of in-breeding in the blood. There was more than a little of that in those hills then, born of proximity and inaccessibility and sheer xenophobia. But the skewedness that poured from the old house like invisible smoke was madness pure and simple, and in my grandmother’s case it chose, as its object, God.

My grandmother was a religious fanatic from the day she was converted by a hellfire-screaming, circuit-riding preacher in her sixteenth year on the other side of the Mountain from Trinity College. By the time her daughter died naked in her lust and I came to her, she was drunk on God. By the time my grandfather began taking me to work with him, she was so deeply possessed by the Holy Ghost that even he, stone-cold man that he was himself, feared she would harm me if I were left alone with her. Mamaw never ceased trying, with cries and threats and apocalyptic quotes from the Old Testament