Dimestore (8 page)

On Lou's Porch

IT WAS THE HOT, MUGGY
summer of 1980; I was in Abingdon, Virginia, for a week to teach the creative writing class that always preceded “literary day” at the Virginia Highlands Festival. I got hotter and hotter each step I took up the long staircase to the room where the class would meet, above the sanctuary in the old United Methodist Church right on Main Street. Finally I made it, and surveyed the group seated around a big oak table. It was about what you'd expect—eight or ten people, mostly high school English teachers, some librarians, some retirees. We had already gone around the table and introduced ourselves when here came this old woman in a man's hat and fuzzy bedroom shoes, gray head shaking a little with palsy, huffing and puffing up the stairs, dropping notebooks and pencils all over the place, greeting everybody with a smile and a joke. She was a real commotion all by herself.

“Hello there, young lady,” she said to me. “My name is Lou Crabtree, and I just love to write!” My heart sank like a stone. Here was every creative writing teacher's nightmare: the nutty old lady who will invariably write sentimental drivel and monopolize the class as well.

“Pleased to meet you,” I lied. The week stretched out before me, hot and intolerable, an eternity. But I had to pull myself together. Looking around at all those sweaty, expectant faces, I began, “Okay, now I know you've brought a story with you to read to the group, so let's start out by thinking about beginnings, about how we start a story . . . let's go around the room, and I want you to read the first line of your story aloud.”

So we began. Nice lines, nice people. A bee hummed at the open window; a square of golden sunlight fell on the old oak table; somebody somewhere was mowing grass. We got to Lou, who cleared her throat and read this line: “Old Rellar had thirteen miscarriages and she named every one of them.”

I sat up. “Would you read that line again?” I asked.

“Old Rellar had thirteen miscarriages and she named every one of them,” Lou read.

I took a deep breath. “Keep going,” I said.

“Only of late, she got mixed up and missed some. This bothered her. She looked toward the iron bed. It had always been exactly the same. First came the prayer, then the act with Old Man gratifying himself . . .”

She read the whole thing. It ended with the lines: “You live all your life and work things up to come to nothing. The bull calf bawled somewhere.”

I had never heard anything like it.

“Lou,” I asked her after class, “have you written anything else? I'd like to see it.”

The next day, she brought a battered suitcase. And there it all was, poems and stories written on every conceivable kind of notebook and paper, even old posters and shirtbacks.

Lou grinned at me. “This ain't all, either,” she said. The next day, she brought more.

All that week, I read these poems and stories, immersing myself in Lou's magic, primal world of river hills and deep forest, of men and women and children as elemental as nature itself, of talking animals and ghosts, witchcraft and holiness. For Lou Crabtree was that rarity—a writer of perfect pitch and singular knowledge, a real artist. And most amazing of all (to me, anyway, simultaneously revising a mediocre novel of my own), she had written all this with no thought of publication. Writing was how she lived, I realized. It was what she lived by.

“I just write for my own enjoyment,” Lou told me. “It pleases me very much to sit down with pencil and paper, and something will come out that looks pretty good, and sounds pretty good, and it gives me pleasure in my soul. I think the best writing time is in the night time. And it is a wonderful time between twelve o'clock and maybe four . . . It is a very strange feeling when all the world is asleep but you. You feel like you're in touch with something special. And then as I write, I don't know what time it is, what day it is. It is that thing of getting out of yourself, of getting out of the world, going out of the world. You feel good, real good. You have none of these problems or hurts or anything. It is something I wish everybody could discover in their work. If they really are doing the thing they like to do, they are able to get out of their self. And it is wonderful. Very wonderful.”

I asked her then what she'd do if somebody came along and told her that she couldn't write anymore. “Well, you know, I would just have to sneak!” she said.

For the first time, I began to understand the therapeutic power of language, the importance of the writing process itself. Years later, I would write a novel named
Fair and Tender Ladies
in which my main character writes letters in order to make sense of her life, in much the same way Lou had always written her poems and stories.

But that summer, I put aside the lackluster novel I was working on, and took Lou up on her offer to guide me and my little boys out “adventuring.” We climbed down into a cave where Lou swore that Daniel Boone himself had “hid out.” We went walking in the woods. She showed them how to make frog houses and pokeberry ink; we all took off our shoes to wade in the creek, then made little plates and cups for fairies from the red clay mud.

“Here, honey,” she said, leaning over to pick up a buckeye as we walked back beneath the sunset sky. “Put this in your pocket. It's good luck. And get your head out of them clouds, honey. Pay attention.” We went back to sit on her porch, talking to everybody that came by. We had potato chips and Moon Pies for dinner.

I've been trying to pay attention ever since, realizing that writing is not about fame, or even publication. It is not about exalted language, abstract themes, or the escapades of glamorous people. It is about our own real world and our own real lives and understanding what happens to us day by day, it is about playing with children and listening to old people.

THE PASSAGE OF TIME ADDED
a special poignancy to Lou's work. In her poem “Smith Creek No. 1,” for instance, she told how she “loathed the likes of Smith Creek where I followed my husband to . . . those years of borning five young ones by myself with no doctor and washing for five on a board until four o'clock, until the sun dropped behind Gumm's Hill.” Hard times. Yet after the passage of many years, this period took on a beautiful elegaic glow. In “ ‘Smith Creek No. 2 (feeling bad about writing Smith Creek No. 1),' ” she is “calling back those years of planting harvesting / Breathing touching among our meanderings / In and out of lives where we pursued / All strange and wonderful things / Down deep into the mysterious dark / Where the roots wind about the heart” as “The seasons change and go. The fire eyes of an opossum glow.” The final image was one of peaceful beauty, life come gloriously full circle at last: “In Smith Creek, a scarlet leaf floats round and round.”

“You know how the mist comes up and covers the land, lots of times?” Lou asked me. “Some of these people that I write about are from a long time ago, they're not anymore, they're just kind of like the mist that covers my mountains. Sometimes I think they may still be there in those mountains. My people may still be right there.”

Lou was born on the North Fork of the Holston River, one of ten children in the Price family. “We ran all over the hills and watched from behind trees and played Indians, and I knew more flowers and animals than I did people.” She went to the Radford Normal School at sixteen, graduating cum laude in three years, then returned home to teach. Lou married Homer Crabtree in 1942 and moved to the Smith Creek area, near where she was born. She had five children in seven years, taking a ten-year leave from teaching to “raise cattle, tobacco, and young'uns. Oh, money is scarce on a mountain.” Lou characterized her husband as a “very soft-spoken man . . . a very calm and kind man . . . a man that people would come and sit down and talk to.” Later she returned to the classroom, teaching just about every subject at every level, from a one-room school to elementary and high schools.

After Homer's death, Lou bought her home at 313 Valley Street for $4,000, money she'd “saved up” from teaching, and moved into town in 1960 as a widow with five teenagers. In reminiscing about the “early widow phase,” Lou winks at me: “Oh, you'll have lots of opportunities as a young widow. They say, ‘When you're old, I'll take care of you' . . . like hell they will! I was through and done with all that.” Her son George “who raises those old Charolais cattle” shared her Valley Street home for a long time. Even after her official retirement, Lou continued to teach all manner of classes, especially enjoying the GED and English as a Second Language groups, “getting to know some gorgeous people, from Viet Nam, and Japan, and Venezuela . . . well, everyplace!”

She was also the leader of the Rock of Ages Band of senior citizens, which performed all over the area. “We have three pianists in case one gets sick, we can fall back on another one. We have a mandolin player and a guitar player and an autoharp. Mr. Harold Clark on the mandolin, he is eighty-some years old, and he can play that ‘Somewhere My Love.' His wife is one of our chaperones. You wouldn't think we need chaperones, but we do! We have got the best banjo player in town, her name is Love Craig, and she is eighty-five years old. Oh, can she play that banjo! Now that is really something, to hear Love Craig play the banjo.”

I agree, having served as “roadie” on several tours with the Rock of Ages Band.

But always, Lou was writing, her life a testament to the sustaining and revitalizing power of language. She often stuck her brother into a story. “He died at the age of thirty, after coming back from the war one year, and he was an alcoholic, so that was a great grief to me. Oh yes, we were close. Now once in a while when I put in this character Bud, that's my brother. It makes me feel good, you know, that though he died, I can keep him going.” Her writing was widely published; Louisiana State University Press brought out her collection of stories,
Sweet Hollow
, in 1984. (The publisher was startled when he first called her house and George answered, as he invariably did, “Hello! Poorhouse!”—“Hoping they'd think it was something else, and sometimes they did!” Lou laughed.) Her book of poems,
The River Hills and Beyond
, came out from Sow's Ear Press in 1998. Lou won the Virginia Cultural Laureate in Literature Award, the Governor's Award for Arts in Virginia, as well as a special award from the Virginia Highlands Festival.
Calling on Lou,
a one-woman stage play celebrating her life and work, premiered at the Barter Theater in Abingdon and then toured Virginia; she even appeared on the
Today Show
.

But none of this meant much to Lou. She called the later phase of her life “the porch years” and what she liked to do most was sit out on that porch where I visited her so many times amid the jumble of old furniture and plants and knickknacks, just talking and reading and watching the traffic pass by. Sometimes we sang a little. “Oh darling, you can't love but one. Oh darling, you can't love but one. You can't love but one and have any fun . . . You can't love ten and love me again—Oh boy, I'm leaving on that midnight train!” or “Cindy got religion, she danced around and 'round, she got so full of glory, she knocked the preacher down!” We laughed a lot.

In winter, we'd sit inside by the heater near her sturdy bed layered with quilts, books, and manuscripts piled everyplace. Everything in that room was precious to her. “Now, take these cabinets. My husband's people were cabinetmakers. Fine old cabinetmakers. They could join up two pieces of wood so it looked like it growed together. That's my mother's blue vase up there. It is a cobalt blue and they don't make that cobalt anymore. They use all that cobalt in cancer treatment.” Lou herself never took so much as an aspirin. She lived entirely in the front room by then, with kitchen and bathroom at hand and a good view of Valley Street out the bay window. She had a steady stream of visitors, pilgrims like myself.

“Why, there've been people here from the Arctic regions, just dying to talk. A man was in here the other day that had climbed Mt. Everest, and a woman came who was going on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. I've always wanted to go on that myself,” Lou told me.

“Why not?” I asked. “A lot of people take up traveling when they retire.”

“Why, I don't have to!” she laughed. “I have traveled all over the world right here on this porch. People talk to me, they take me to all these places that they've been to. We are in a changing time, but people do like to talk. They will come and sit down here and talk—especially if they can laugh!”

“These porch years are very creative for me,” Lou said. She also called them her “spiritual years.” She became interested in space, even taking a course from the University of Virginia. She wrote more than fifty “space poems.”

When I asked why she had gotten so fascinated with space, Lou answered, “Because it's out there! Our universe is like a great big clock, run by God's laws of chemistry, math, biology, and science . . . Now you know He doesn't do things mish-mash! And there'll come a day when the spirit will take leave of this old body. It's going to rise up to Paradise, and I wanted to know where Paradise was! So I've found out by science how it's going to happen. When you go faster than the speed of light, then you get younger and younger. Science and scripture agree! You're going to live forever in paradise, and you'll be young. I can't wait!”

Lou's new interest seemed to be an expansion—not a contradiction—of traditional religion. “I went to churches all my life,” she told me, mentioning the old Centenary Methodist Church in particular. “I never went to a church in my life that I wasn't helped. And now,” she said, “I'm open! I'm open to everything!”

I told Lou that I believed I finally understand something she told me so long ago: “ ‘You have to travel a lonely road. It is you yourself traveling along, and if you are able along the road to meet a friend, to meet a love . . . you're very, very lucky. But it is a lonely road even though you have sons and daughters that you love better than your own life—that you'd give your own life for. One day you have to let them go, you let them all go. Oh, all right, it's a lonely road.' ”