The Pritchett Century (18 page)

A man getting corn out of his barn told us we could spend the night at his sister’s house. He had a grandiloquent figure, filling his overalls to an ample blue like a bombastic sky, wearing his black hat—through which his hair stuck like ears of wheat at the side of the crown—more as a tilted and permanent gesture of expatiation than as headgear.

He was delighted with life. As we walked with him toward his sister’s solitary shack poked onto the brow of a hill, he pointed out to us high lifts of land and askew triangles of corn and rye and pasturage which he owned on the ridge.

“Nat Pearcy is my name. Yessir. I didn’t catch yours. Oh, yes. Why, right smart of them folk living in Gap Creek over Cloudland. There’s Ned, and Doc, and Tom, and Commodore. Would you-uns be like kin to them? Well, no, I guess not, because you-uns comes over the waters. Whaur did you-uns come from? Are you married? So am I. Well, well! My wife went over to Linville to pick galax for a week. If she was here
I’d have ye lodge with us. That’s my house. No, thata one, thar. Them’s my fields, way up to the yan side of thata wood and then yan ways down the creek. Hit’s a right pretty piece.

“And how old did you-uns say you-uns is? Why, and jes kinda hikin’ round? That’s what ol’ man Alison did. He came over the waters too. He jes went sportin’ roun’ peddlin’. I hain’t seed the like o’ thata one. He was an Irishman. He jes went snoopin’ aroun’ like you-uns, peddlin’ things, toting ’em on his back, and gettin’ folk to take him in o’ nights. He sure was the workingest man I ever seed. He used to tell us about Canady and Jerusalem. Sight in the world o’ peddlers comes thisa way and they all says what Alison says: ‘Thar hain’t better water nor the mountain water in the world.’ Hit’s plumb pure.”

On the air was the odor of fallen apples. On the highest ranges of the mountains drawn back in gray austerity white clouds were curtaining. A blue gauze of thundercloud shone in a low gap. The sky, burdened for hours, and tiring of its pulling sacks of vapor, seemed to pause, look around helplessly. Unable to hold out, it released those blue sacks and the white hail grain streamed and channeled down. And dull balls of thunder bumped over the gap and rolled cannoning down the creek.

“That sure is a pretty sight,” shouted Mr. Pearcy as we ran. “Hit’s fallin’ right hard.”

Mr. Pearcy’s sister, Mrs. Ayres, lived in a shack of two small rooms, each containing two wide beds. The walls and roof had slits of open air between the cracks in the beams and boards. There was no ceiling. The walls were partly papered by tailors’ catalogues and newspapers. There was a fireless iron stove in the middle of the room. Mrs. Ayres had a pale earthen countenance, and a chin which levered forth her words resonantly.

But Mr. Pearcy’s gusty eloquence silenced all by its heartiness. He picked up a newspaper three months old and began reading about Mustafa Kemal. “That’s what ol’ man Alison used to say. He waur the travelingest man I know’d. Hit’s dangerous, he told me. If that thar Mustafa goes on a ’fiscatin’ o’ everything, that’ll get the Greco-Japanese alliance plumb tore up. Was you-uns ever in Jerusalem? No? Alison was. Thar hain’t nowhaur Alison hain’t bin.”

Mrs. Ayres, allied with the smell of dinner, silenced her brother. As we took our places on the benches she shouted, “Now you-uns jes help yourselves, like hit was your own homes, and jes reach what you-uns wants. Here, Ned”—to her husband, sliding some chunks of salt-encrusted bacon to him off the dish. Then to us, explaining, “I help him first, like he was kind o’ handier.”

Everyone ate with great gesticulation, Mrs. Ayres standing on the bridge, as it were, commanding as the conversation continued scrappily.

“Have ye fed the hogs, Ned?”

“Zeb Vance says he’s got pretty smart o’ honey, this month.”

“Thar’s sights o’ wagons on the pike goin’ up and Tom McKinney’s got his mules.”

“If only this rain had fallen in the summer. When I seed them clouds fallin’ over the gap, I thought, Hit sure is goin’ to rain at last. An’ hit come, plumb hard.”

“Hit’s real mean haulin’ water from the spring, because our’n dried up.”

After a pause, a thin piping voice from the end of the table: “Whaur does you-uns ’spectation to end, like whaur is you-all goin’?”

I had scarcely noticed him before, Mrs. Ayres’s husband. He had sat against the wall with his small flat head against a string of drying peppers. His skin was pink and fair, and was tightly stretched over his face making his eyes peer out in two small, hard balls, inquisitively, birdlike. As he sat there, his head barely above the table, he seemed ephemeral, like a slice of thundercloud with a pink sunset flush to it, which might melt into colored waters and disappear if the sun became too strong. He was but the cloud. His brother-in-law was the thunder.

After dinner a neighboring mountaineer and his wife stopped and came in, slowly and gravely, smiling appropriately like a diplomatic corps. The conversation of the men drifted strangely to the subject of courthouses and trials, and Mr. Pearcy expatiated on the rights of juries, and by a suspicious association of ideas began to talk freely about “hit,” and how difficult it was to make “hit,” but how, in spite of the “revenue,” some assumed the risk.

I was surprised at these confidences, but an apologetic, quizzical expression
on the face of the grave neighbor led me to believe that Nat Pearcy, having found an audience, was remembering “with advantages.” Talk waned to the subject of postage stamps, and then Nat Pearcy picked up the newspaper again and brought us back to Mustafa Kemal. Mr. Ayres, cloud pale, said shyly:

“Nat sure is the readingest man in the world.”

But Nat demurred modestly:

“The readingest man and the travelingest man I ever know’d waur Gashry Alison. I hain’t seed him for a right smart bit. Mebbe he has quit peddlin’ and built him a house somewhaur.”

The strangers went. Mr. and Mrs. Ayres and their three children blew out the lamp and got into the two beds, with all their clothes on. We were given the other bed. Through the wide cracks and holes in the walls and roof we could see the wet, vague hills and hear the shrill scissoring of the crickets. Once in the night, rain drummed down and splashed at us. The wide air pushed in. All night the room was loud with the squeaking, creaking and scampering of little feet on the floors and beds, and with the tearing of paper and the overturning of tins, in minute pandemonium. Gashry Alison—what a name, I thought. And he had slept under that very roof.

Broken in to the mountains now, we assaulted new heights, took unknown trails and saw with little wonder the mounting contours and abrupt dropping of the ridges. The leaves of the rhododendrons were long, dew-weighted arcs. The massed and intricate undergrowth of the woods drooped with condensing vapors. Infinitesimal spheres of water lay in dim rind over bark and foliage. Early forms of mist floated like curled leaves in the pools of morning in the valleys.

Clouds were low like motionless surf, poised forever without falling. There were the wet odors of fallen and decaying leaves, of new-cut timber, of sodden fibrous soil, the green dankness of the woods, the rude smell of bruised leaves and of moss-grown tree wreckage, the tang of broken ramage of fir, balsam, spruce, of chestnut,
hickory, walnut, oak and maple. The morning vapors sucked strong flavors from the earth, and the tepid gray of coming rain seemed to draw out of the mountain floor a bitter, green exhalation of sap.

We climbed over miles of mist-choked woodland, passing no one except an occasional black-hatted mountaineer with his gun, swinging out of the laurel and jumping onto the track, hiding his suspicions with a parrying “Howdy.” Clay and ocher leaves were matted on the boots of these men, and moss stains were on their overalls, and their black hats were faded to lichen and verdigris.

Violet smoke spiraled cannily heavenward from dingles where women were boiling water and washing clothes near the springs. They boiled the clothes in huge brass caldrons. The greeting was always the smiling, “Howdy,” masking a quick scrutiny. But the polite hospitality always shone through: “If you-uns is tired, get ye chairs up at t’house and rest up a spell, an’ take some apples. The spring done dried up so I hauled the clothes down to thisa one and lit me a fire here to save fetchin’ water to bile. Has thar bin no rain whaur you-uns come fro’? Wall they claim hit’s the same in all the world.”

The shacks were one- or two-roomed, with a bending porch and a barn, the timber charred and flaked with age, like warped black wafers. Trays of sliced apples would be drying on the roofs, strings of peppers hanging in the windows, and a drying sheepskin in the barn. Lines of rain were traveling down the creek toward us, a dense warp taut from the looms of cloud. Scarlet birds pitched out of the laurel with the tumbling flights of bats.

“Hit’s clar over Cloudland,” said a youth, gathering apples. “But them weather birds means rain.”

Crossing the stepping-stones of a river we met in midstream an oldish man carrying a bag. He was gentler than the usual mountaineer. He wore a frayed but neat black suit, and a newish black hat with a crown unsullied by defiant bulge or hollow. He wore no collar. His eyes were pale as watery sunlight and the lineaments of his face were penciled with a natural irony and obstinacy. He spoke in reedy falsetto. He twinkled half gayly, half superciliously before us and said:

“Howdy. Pretty day! Yessir! What’s your name? Where do you all
come from? Waal. That your wife? Where are ye going? My name’s Sam Robinson. I am a preacher. I go everywhere. I belong to no one. No one belongs to me. I belong to myself. Kinda strange to think of a man not belonging to himself! Mighty glad to know ye and if you’re over the Tennessee side ye’ll find my folk on the hills. They’ve got farms, and cows and hogs and sheep. Sam Robinson, and remember I don’t belong to no one.”

Leaving it at that he left us abruptly, jumped to the next stone in the river and turned up the mountain; and the woof of haze rising in the rain’s warp wove him into the gray-green blur of wet.

We entered the trees again and still climbing, we heard the rain clattering on the roof of the forest and leaking in crackling channels and spouts. We went for miles up the green forest caverns, and the close, spindling tree trunks, distancing to a blur of silver, seemed to pour like cold and noiseless torrents from the sky. Gashry Alison must have taken that trail a score of times, we imagined, silently trudging, absorbing from the still air of the solitary acres of woodland, new currents of eloquence.

At a break in the trail we hit a creek and there was a high barnlike store there propped up high on a platform. Posters of sales, wanted men, and advertisements were pasted on the planks, and were tearing limply from them. The storekeeper was sitting at the door reading a large Bible. His gun stood beside him. It turned out he was the sheriff, and from his conversation and girth we perceived he played a gigantic part in the scattered community of ten farms and a white church tiptoed on a knoll.

A yellow beard, like a corn shuck, spouted from the sheriff’s chin. His voice had the nasal pitch of the village dialectician. He denounced Darwin partly as a nincompoop, partly as an ill-equipped emissary from Avernus. He told us of the theological disputes of the creek, the public debates about the Scriptures, in which he had downed many an opponent amid the applause of one side and the groans of the other.

“The last time waur wan I defended ol’ Sam Robinson. Does you-uns know him? Waal, he hain’t no debater and waur kinda ’fused like by a feller from Roarin’ Creek. He allowed he waur a right smart feller, but he looked a purty mean sort o’ popskull wan I’d finished. ‘I suspicioned
hit all ’long,’ I said opening the Bible. ‘Ye can’t ’scape Holy Writ. Ye hain’t even got your tex’ c’rrect!’ ”

For days afterward I confess I was merely amused by this muscular Christian, who the next moment was describing how he had repulsed a “shootin’ up fray” from over the state line, roped his prisoners to chairs, and read the New Testament to them. But a mountaineer took me to task and showed me that men like the sheriff had done a lot, after their fashion, to destroy much of the superstition and emotionalism to be found in the creeks.

“Sky’s gettin’ clar,” said the sheriff as we walked to the door. I asked if he had ever heard of Gashry Alison, the peddler.

“Why, reckon I did. He used to come in here, peddlin’ things—clothes, spectacles, brooches. He tol’ me he was born in Jerusalem. That’s in Turkey. Waal, pretty smart o’ peddlers and sich comes thisa way. But thar hain’t one like ol’ Gash Alison. He’s bin sportin’ ’roun’ the whole of Americky on foot. He’s a quare man. He’s got a quare furrin name too. He tol’ me, ‘I’m the only Gash in the world. My mother said wan I was born—’ ”

A horseman jumping down at the door looked in, up, about and around, and stopped when he saw us. He then picked up a sack of flour and laid it, behind the saddle. Mounting, he leaned over and smiled at the sheriff, and called:

“Doc says the apples is all picked and the firs’ waggon is way up on the yan side o’ Ripshin Ridge.”

“Jinks,” exclaimed the sheriff. “Must be plumb on the Pike.”

And locking up the store, he walked off lankily with his gun and his Bible.

He looked at us tolerantly. He turned and pointed up the creek, saying: “I disremember ’xackly, but mebbe hit’s ten miles an’ terrible rough. Does you-uns ’spectation to get to the top? Waal, it sure is a wunnerful place. They say ye can see—”

“It’s burning. Keep a-stirrin’ it,” threw in his wife, a dry, cane-colored
woman, crisp and lined like a corn shuck. His little rapture fell like a cut stalk. He turned to the steam and the smoke and went on stirring the apple butter in the huge black caldron. He was stirring with a heavy wooden pole six feet long.

The caldron was standing on a stick fire in the field, and at a distance from the heat of it his barefooted wife and his barefooted daughters were slicing apples and throwing them into the caldron. The eyes of this family seen through the keen haze of cobalt smoke had a wildness in them. This might have been the witch scene in
Macbeth
.