Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail (6 page)

They had only $5,000 to put down from the sale of their other farm, which meant there was work to be done between there and comfortable. Emma threw herself into it, and saved until it hurt. The children all worked hard, too. By two years old, they were sweeping floors and gathering eggs. By three they were collecting kindling for the potbellied stove. By four they were washing and drying dishes. By five they knew how to wash their own clothes.

Each morning, P.C. would rise at five and dress and walk to the bottom of the stairs, where he’d pound on the newel post while calling out their names. The kids would jump to their feet from where they slept, four to a bed. The girls swept the house and did the dishes and sometimes helped prepare the meals. After breakfast, they’d all head out into the fields to hoe or pull weeds or pick
vegetables or deworm the tobacco plants. The younger children were charged with filling a bucket with lime and walking among the muskmelons and watermelons, sprinkling the mixture on the vines as they went.

To prepare the fields, P.C. hitched a drag to a team of horses to break the earth, and the kids would sometimes climb onto the flat wooden contraption and drag their bare feet in the loamy soil.

Emma went to the fields each day and worked alongside the farmhands, as did all the kids. When the work was done, the children would tear off across the bottoms toward the Ohio River, between their home and the mountains. A few of them could swim to the other side, but most stayed in the shallows, laughing and splashing off the day’s dirt. They’d sing “Old Black Joe” and climb inside an old tire and spank each other down the hillside.

At harvest time, they’d pick muskmelons, watermelons, tomatoes, cucumbers, and corn. P.C. took most of it to the Saturday market down in Huntington. The rest they ate or canned or sold at a little vegetable stand by the highway. Muskmelons or a dozen ears of sweet corn for ten cents. Cucumbers for a penny each. Emma canned hundreds of gallons of fruits and vegetables for the summer and winter, and the shelves in the cold underground cellar were lined with scores of half-gallon jars.

They ate everything that came from the earth and wasn’t poisonous, from blackberries to persimmons to wild raspberries. They learned that birds and animals don’t go hungry, so why should people? So many trees and bushes provided food—hickory nut, beechnut, walnut, honey locust pod, maple syrup, crabapple, mulberry, plum, cherry, huckleberry. Edible plants included dandelions, narrow dock, wild lettuce, white top, clovers, violets, meadow lettuce, poke leaves, and milkweed. And nothing went to waste.

Once in a while the men would kill a fattened hog, and they’d build a fire under a fifty-five-gallon drum full of well water. Late
in the day they’d string the hog from a tree and gut it. When the water was hot enough they’d lower the heavy carcass into the drum, then crank it back up and run their sharpened knives over the flesh to remove the coarse hair from the hide. They’d portion the hog and Emma would take the hams, prepare them and smoke them in the smokehouse. She’d take all the meat from the head and cover it in brine in a ceramic crock, sometimes adding a little vinegar, and make hog’s head cheese. She’d stuff green peppers with shredded cabbage and dunk them into the brine. It wasn’t rare for the kids to eat so much that they became sick.

When she cured the bacon, she’d remove the rind and cut it into small strips and cook it in a heavy pot to render the lard and preserve the skin, which she called cracklings. The children ached for the hog slaughter because it meant their school lunches would include biscuits and homemade jam and fried pork loin.

Emma made apple butter in a giant cauldron over a large fire outside. She put the girls in charge of stirring the fresh, peeled apples constantly with a long wooden paddle and they occasionally got too close and felt the sting of popping hot apple butter on their skin.

She made chicken and dumplings and chicken and noodles and every once in a while, on special occasions, fried chicken. Once every summer a man drove around to the farms with a truck full of various cuts of beef. Emma would peek inside and ask the man about prices. She could never afford much, but sometimes she’d walk away with a chuck roast and she’d make a giant pot of stew. Beef was rare, though—so rare that one of the boys walked into the barn once and bit a cow on the ear to see if it tasted like beef.

She served breakfast at a long table, and P.C. always sat at the head. Sometimes, if the farmhands joined them, there’d be seventeen mouths waiting to be fed. She’d come from the kitchen with large pans of biscuits, bowls of oatmeal and cornmeal mush, and bacon. She served pancakes but refused to flavor her syrup.

When the children needed to relieve themselves, they used the outhouse, which they called “the closet” or “bath with a path.” It was a three-seater, and they wiped their behinds with pages torn from the Sears, Roebuck catalog to save money on toilet paper. They walked to school, barefoot sometimes, because they each got just two pairs of twenty-five-cent shoes a year, and they had to make them last.

At Christmas, P.C. would chop down a tree and drag it home. The older children would string popcorn and make ornaments from last year’s wrapping paper or the tinfoil from chewing gum or cigarette packages that they found along the road. Their stockings were filled with an orange, a banana, a candy cane, English walnuts, and a new pencil or handkerchief. Most of the larger gifts they shared, including a sled one year and a single pair of roller skates another. Emma sometimes made the girls little dolls with ceramic heads and sawdust stuffing.

P.C. was a thinker, a renaissance man, and his neighbors thought highly of him, even if he overpaid his farmhands. He’d taught school for fifteen years—at the one-room Oak Dale and Waugh Bottom schools—before he quit to run a farm and grow a family, which expanded again in 1920, with the birth of twins, Robert Wilson and Elizabeth Caldwell. He drew blueprints and built a beautiful modern home for his parents on a hillside not far away. He also designed and constructed a new schoolhouse at Swan Creek.

The neighbors knew of his above-average intellect. He’d bought a large tobacco barn for one hundred dollars from a man who lived a mile away and had numbered every board, into the thousands, then disassembled the barn and hauled it down the road and up the hill and to a level patch behind their house where he rebuilt it, nail by nail and board by board. When he finished the project, he climbed to the peak of the aluminum roof and did a handstand while the farmhands cheered at his thin silhouette.

On Sundays, he required the children attend church. They’d pack into a pew at the Methodist church near Swan Creek, where they’d sweat and swat flies for hours while the preacher tried to save their souls from eternal damnation. P.C. made a point of delivering a short sermon to the congregation, himself, when the preacher had finished.

Always, though, just beyond the thin shroud of his respectable public persona, there gurgled a mean streak, and if something set him off, he’d grow wild-eyed and his veins would bulge. His children once watched him beat a stubborn horse half to death with a leather strop. He was prone to administer discipline on his own blood with a briar switch or fire poker or whatever instrument was close at hand.

His madness, in the right moment, wasn’t even bound by law. In 1924, a year after Emma delivered their ninth child, P.C. killed a man.

P. C. Gatewood and Hiram Johnson got into an argument one afternoon. The state would charge P.C. with manslaughter and the trial would drag on. Young Monroe, twelve at the time, would testify that Hiram Johnson had fetched his rifle and Monroe had fetched his daddy’s for him, and just as Hiram had raised his gun, P.C. had swung his and caught Johnson on the forehead, the approximate site of a fresh wound from an earlier scrap the old man had found himself in. He never regained consciousness and four days later, in the hospital, Hiram died.

Word was that Johnson’s widow would not sue P.C. because he’d paid the medical bills and funeral expenses. But a lawyer from Huntington, West Virginia, convinced her to try for a settlement and she won. P.C. was convicted of manslaughter and ordered to pay $50,000. His prison sentence was suspended because he had nine children and a farm to tend to, but the debt was so burdensome
that he had to sell half the land. Even then he couldn’t make ends meet, and each year it got worse. By the time Dora Louise was born in 1926, and Lucy Eleanor in 1928, P.C. was struggling to keep his farm running. In August 1929, he got a job with the Ohio Township rural school board, hauling pupils from Sugar Creek to Crown City and back for seventy-five dollars a month. He converted an old pickup truck into a makeshift school bus to make the runs. The board hired him again the following year, but in 1932 the contract went to Stanley Swain, who offered to do it for seven dollars less.

The extra income was missed as the Gatewoods inched through the worst of the Great Depression and tried to cope with a drought that had started in the east and raked across the country toward the Great Plains. Crop prices had fallen drastically. That same year, nearly 40 percent of the labor force was out of work. By the following year, more than 40 percent of Ohio factory workers and 67 percent of Ohio construction workers were unemployed, and many of them, with nowhere to turn, were moving from cities like Akron and Toledo and Columbus to the countryside to try to feed their children off the land.

It wasn’t unusual for tramps to stop at the house on the hill and ask for food. They all had the same look of desperation. Though she eschewed government handouts, Emma was always generous and invited them to sit on the porch and enjoy a hearty meal. She’d do anything for someone who needed help, and often nursed sick friends back to health. P.C. occasionally let the tramps sleep in his barn if they promised not to smoke. The children sometimes followed the travelers down the highway, and they’d grow old remembering one particular family. The man was driving a dog team, which was pulling a small cart loaded with their possessions. The woman was pregnant, clutching a young child, her feet hanging down off the back.

In 1932, as progressive New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt chased vulnerable President Herbert Hoover, P.C., a longtime
Republican, switched parties. Emma would have none of it. When the election rolled around, P.C. was in his sickbed, eaten up with ulcers. Pollsters were dispatched to his home to record his vote, but Emma wouldn’t let them inside. This event added yet another layer to their discord.

P. C. Gatewood, with the help of his wife and children, held on, but they wouldn’t hold the farm through the decade. And he was becoming increasingly difficult to live with.

Emma trudged on, as May wound down, through lonely woods. She sucked on bouillon cubes as she hiked, and found water where she could. She filled up on wild strawberries—whenever she found a patch, she’d drop her sack and stuff it with as many as she could carry. After a hard climb up Shuckstack Mountain, she discovered a dented trash can lid that had collected a small puddle of rainwater. It was just enough to wet her throat. She cleaned the lid to collect more from the looming rainstorm. There was just enough room on the precipice for a small fire tower, and she made her bed on the porch, propping up several planks to shield her from the strong wind.

The next afternoon, she ran into a man and woman, the first couple she’d seen on the trail. She was out of food, and after she explained what she was doing, the day hikers felt sorry for her and divided their supplies. She made it to Spence Camp in a downpour, a rain so hard she couldn’t light a fire. It was only 4:00
PM
, but she hung up her wet clothes and climbed into the lean-to and tried to sleep, wet as she was.

She wasn’t down long when a man appeared out of the woods. He introduced himself as Lionel Edna and said he had been painting trail blazes, white, two inches by six inches long, on trees along the path. He fixed himself supper as they chatted, then climbed into his
sleeping bag on the opposite side of the shelter. They talked a while before drifting off.

She left early the next morning and the wind had picked up, giant gusts that nearly blew her down. The weather was odd, she thought, for May in the South. The rain started at 11:00 and she decided to call it a day when she reached a shelter around 2:00 P
M.
She found some dry wood and built a fire and washed and dried her clothes.

The following afternoon, she trudged into Newfound Gap, near the center of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and into the strangest scene she’d seen so far. There were people everywhere at the popular park, including about a dozen nuns who were slapping each other on the back and acting like teenagers. She watched one of them climb onto a wall and shout and jump off, as the rest of them laughed. They were giddy, having fun and playing around a stone monument built to honor the Rockefellers.

Emma noticed a bus stop nearby. Her shoes were about ruined, and hiking through all this rain without a raincoat was miserable, so she reckoned she could use a few supplies. Gatlinburg, Tennessee, wasn’t far, so she decided she’d catch the bus. Just then, one of the nuns approached and asked if she could take a picture of Emma.