The Run for the Elbertas (20 page)

For a distance up the mountain the trees were woolly with fog, but as the truck climbed the mist vanished and the heat fell away. Riar's spirits rose as he mounted, the cramping ceased. The engine pulled the livelier. They had crossed the Kentucky line in the gap and were headed down when the boys began to wriggle.

Afterword

After six years of schoolkeeping at the forks of Troublesome Creek in Knott County, I moved nine miles farther back in the hills to a century-old log house between the waters of Dead Mare Branch and Wolfpen, on Little Carr Creek. These streams boxed me in. I raised my own food and stored vegetables and fruits for the cold months; I kept two stands of bees for their honey, and for the ancient custom of “telling the bees.”

In those days the post office was called Bath, named after the oldest Roman town in England, and the mail carrier travelled on horseback. I joined the folk life of the scattered community, attending church meetings, funeralizings, corn pullings, hog butcherings, box suppers at the one-room school, sapping parties, and gingerbread elections. There were two goods stores within walking distance, one at the foot of Little Carr, the other a mile above. These were the social centers where local happenings and human doings were discussed.

A neighbor said of me, “He's quit a good job and come over in here and just sot down.” I did sit down and finished writing the novel
River of Earth.
And I wrote many a poem and short story, most of which found their way into national publications. A number of the stories were reprinted in
Best American Short Stories
and in O.
Henry Memorial Prize Stories.
One gained an award.

My writings drew on everyday experiences and observations. I only wrote when an idea overwhelmed me. Such as when the waters of Dead Mare Branch dried in August to a
series of diminishing potholes of water, crowded with minnows. Although I drew water from my well and replenished the holes daily, it was to little avail. Few survived until a rain could wash them to the freedom of Little Carr.

LEAP MINNOWS, LEAP

The minnows leap in drying pools.

In islands of water along the creekbed sands

They spring on drying tails, white bellies to the sun,

Gills spread, gills fevered and gasping.

The creek is sun and sand, and fish throats rasping.

One pool has a peck of minnows
.
One living pool

Is knuckle deep with dying
,
a shrinking yard

Of glittering bellies
.
A thousand eyes look, look,

A thousand gills strain, strain the water-air
.

There is plenty of water above the dam, locked and deep,

Plenty, plenty and held. It is not here.

It is not where the minnows spring with lidless fear.

They die as men die. Leap minnows, leap.

Besides growing my own food, I introduced vegetables new to the area. And I began experiments with the wild strawberry and the wild violet, an attempt by natural selection to discover superior plants. The leaf-miner became a subject of study. I found John Muir's observations sound: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” My lamp-lit evenings were spent reading in the fields of literature, history, and science. The classical age in Greece, the American Civil War, and primitive life the world over interested me. The library of Virginia Polytechnic Institute supplied by mail any book I wished to borrow.

Although my stories and poems were appearing in
The Atlantic, The Yale Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review,
and a variety of other publications and I had three published
books, I do not recall encountering anybody during those years who had read them. I wrote in an isolation which was virtually total. Whether that was good or bad I cannot say. More than one rescue party came to try to persuade me back to “civilization.” I didn't leave for any period of time until I joined the army in 1941. I was on another continent and longing for home when I pencilled this verse of recollection:

How it was in that place, how light hung in a bright pool

Of air like water, in an eddy of cloud and sky,

I will long remember. I will long recall

The maples blossoming birds, the oaks proud with rule,

The spiders deep in silk, the squirrels fat on mast,

The fields and draws and coves where quail and peewees call.

Earth loved more than any earth, stand firm, hold fast;

Trees burdened with leaf and wing, root deep, grow tall.

When I moved from Troublesome Creek to the backwoods of the county I had expected to stay only for a summer. I have remained forty years. As the past withdraws it may be that the stories in this volume amount to a social diagram of a folk society such as hardly exists today and may even include some of the uncharted aspects of the Appalachian experience.

JAMES STILL