Listen Here (45 page)

(September 27, 1914–March 18, 1983)

Sarah Catherine Wood Marshall was born in Johnson City, Tennessee, the daughter of Leonara Whitaker Wood, a teacher, and John Ambrose Wood, a minister. Her parents met while working at a mission school in the mountain community of Del Rio, Tennessee, and Marshall used their experiences as the basis for her best-selling novel,
Christy.

Marshall graduated from Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1936, and that same year married a promising young minister, Peter Marshall, a native of Scotland whose powerful sermonizing led to his appointment as the chaplain of the United States Senate.

Peter Marshall served as Senate chaplain from 1947 until his sudden death from a heart attack in 1949. Widowed and with a young son to support, Catherine edited a collection of her husband's sermons and produced a surprise best-seller,
Mr. Jones, Meet the Master.
Encouraged by the response, Marshall decided to pursue a writing career.

In 1951, Marshall published a critically acclaimed biography of her husband,
A Man Called Peter.
The book remained on national best-seller lists for the next three years and also became a popular film. In 1959, Marshall married Leonard LeSourd, the editor of
Guideposts
magazine, and in 1968, the couple became partners in the Chosen Books Publishing Company, based in Lincoln, Virginia.

Marshall's best-known work,
Christy
, is set in the East Tennessee mountains. A fictionalized version of her mother's remembrances, the book sold more than four million copies during the author's lifetime, and remains a perennial favorite on young adult reading lists. Catherine Marshall's collected papers are housed at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta.

In this scene from chapter 38 of
Christy
, Christy is summoned to the cabin of her dear friend Fairlight Spencer, who is seriously ill with typhoid fever.

Fiction:
Julie
(1984),
Christy
(1967).
Nonfiction:
Quiet Times with Catherine Marshall
(1996),
Something More
(1990),
Light in My Darkest Night
(1989),
Together With God: Family Stories, Poems and Prayers of the Marshall Family
(1987),
To Live Again
(1957),
The Prayers of Peter Marshall
(1954),
Mr. Jones, Meet the Master: Sermons and Prayers ojPeter Marshall
(1950).
Books for children:
Stage Fright
(1997),
Mountain Madness
(1997),
Brotherly Love
(1997),
Goodbye, Sweet Prince
(1997),
The Princess Club
(1996),
Christy's Choice
(1996),
The Proposal (1996), The Angry Intruder
(1995),
Silent Superstitions
(1995),
Midnight Rescue
(1995),
The Bridge to Cutter Gap
(1995),
God Loves You: Our Family's Favorite Stories and Prayers
(1973).

Contemporary Authors
, First Revision, Vols. 17–20, 477–78.
Something About the Author
, Vol. 2, 182–83, and Vol. 34, 149–50.

from Chapter Thirty-eight

How can I ever forget that day in early October when Fairlight Spencer sent Zady to tell me that she needed me. Would I please come as soon as possible? No clue was offered as to what the need was. Only Zady's dark brooding eyes and thin face screwed up with worry underscored the urgency.

Nor would the child leave my side until she had seen me saddling Buttons. Then her mission accomplished, without another word she bounded off toward home, streaking across the mission yard, leaping from rock to rock across the creek, running like a brown-legged deer diagonally up across the face of the mountain.

I followed by the more tedious trail, giving Buttons the rein up the low foothills. But as we reached the first heavily wooded spur from which the path rose steeply, my mare was forced to a slow walk. The rhododendron leaves were still straight and shiny, like summer leaves, not beginning to curl as they usually did in the fall. At moments the silence of the woods was so intense that the patter of acorns falling from the oak trees onto the dry leaves sounded like gentle rain.

Though Buttons and I had made this trip often, the mare had never been sure-footed on the heights and she was always skittish about the final ascent to the Spencer cabin. As I rode over the crest of the last rise, I saw that all of the children—except John and Zady—were in the yard watching for me, their faces solemn.

“What a nice welcoming committee,” I greeted them. But there was no gaiety in their response.

Clara came to help me dismount. “Been waitin' for you.” She spoke softly, taking the reins from my hands. “I'll hitch the post to Buttons.”

Such a funny way to say it! “Where's your mother?” I asked.

“Mama's inside.” The tall girl's face was expressionless. She would not look me in the eyes. “She's abed.”

I hurried on into the cabin. From the open door, brilliant autumn sunlight spilled across the floor. But the cabin, usually noisy with activity—children's voices and laughter, kitchen sounds, Jeb's music—was so quiet it seemed deserted. Then I saw her, Fairlight, lying on the bed, the outlines of her body defined by the quilt tucked in around her.

Her face was flushed with a heavy look about it that changed her features. Her eyes were open but bloodshot and dull, her head moving restlessly from side to side on the pillow. I felt her forehead. Hot! Incredibly hot!

“Christy—” One hand crept across the quilt toward me. “You've come.”

“Of course, I've come, Fairlight. Why didn't you send for me sooner?”

“My side hurts—here—so bad.”

Her breathing was heavy with such wheezing that I thought she might have pneumonia.
But it was so early in the autumn. We haven't even had any cold weather.

The children had trailed me into the house and were standing at the foot of the bed, watching me carefully. Their mother held her right hand up in front of her face. “It's bigged. All swelled up. Why is it so big?”

I looked at the hand. Perfectly normal except that the skin was so dry that it was pulled taut. Fairlight's lips, cracked from the fever, were twitching in a strange way.

“Clara, how long has your mother been like this?”

“Mama was ailin', right bad off all last week,” the girl answered. “Complained of a-hurtin' in the head. Yesterday had the trembles. Shook all over like an aspen tree in the wind. But she wouldn't take to her bed.”

“Where's your father?”

“Took the hound-dogs, went ba-ar huntin'—over Laurel Top somewheres.”

“How long has he been gone?”

The girl thought a moment. “I'm not certain-sure. Left at day-bust, ‘twas three days ago, reckon.”

“Christy—” the voice from the bed sounded desperate. Fairlight raised her head off the pillow to look at me, but I had the feeling that her eyes were not focusing. The pupils looked dilated. “Christy, tell them to take the chairs off'n me. All that house plunder they're a-pilin' on me. The chairs—all them chairs. Tell them—They're a-smashin' me. Tell them—” She began coughing, a deep racking cough, painful to hear.

I pressed her hand reassuringly. “Fairlight, there's no furniture on you, no chairs.”

“Off'n me, off'n me. Tell them—
Christy—”

“Fairlight, I'm here now. Right here. I won't let anybody pile anything on you.”

My heart was thumping and my legs trembling.
I must not let the children see my alarm.
I forced myself to speak slowly to try to keep the panic out of my voice. “Clara, hasn't anybody sent for Dr. MacNeill?”

“Mama didn't reckon to need no doctor-medicine.”

“How about John? Is he around? Could I send him for the Doctor?”

“Papa carried him ba-ar huntin' too.”

At that moment Zady appeared in the doorway, breathless and panting from the long climb from the mission.

What was I to do? For the girls it was too long a journey to Doctor MacNeill's cabin and he might not be there anyway.

“Clara,” I said, “we've got to have help. Would you run over to Holcombes' and get one of the men to go fetch the Doctor?”

Already Clara was at the door. “Say they can use Buttons if necessary. And tell them to try the mill first. Usually one of the men there knows where the Doctor is. Oh, and Clara—” The girl stood in the doorway looking at me with large solemn eyes. “Tell them that your mother is really sick. This is an emergency.” She turned and in a moment had disappeared over the brow of the hill.

(July 2, 1958–September 9, 1991)

Journalist and short story author Belinda Ann Mason was a native of Letcher County, Kentucky. “I was born with the mountains in my blood,” said Mason. “I could hear music when people talked.”

Mason earned a B.S. in journalism from the University of Kentucky in 1980, worked in public relations for a time, then settled into a journalism career, writing for two weekly papers: first for the
Ohio County Times-News
in Hartford, Kentucky, and later for the
Appalachian News-Express
in Pikeville, Kentucky. Her short stories appeared in
The American Voice
and
Appalachian Heritage
, and the Kentucky Foundation for Women awarded a grant for Mason to collaborate with the Roadside Theater to produce her play,
Gifts of the Spirit.

In 1987, Mason contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion following the birth of her second child. Facing her situation with quiet courage, Mason became an AIDS-rights advocate, calling for greater sensitivity toward victims of the disease. “AIDS is less about dying than about choosing how to live,” she insisted. In 1989, President Bush appointed her to the National Commission on AIDS.

“One of the most difficult parts of my illness is the loss of my life as a writer,” said Mason. “When people talk to me now, they see the disease first. Nobody talks to Belinda Mason the short story writer anymore.”

Mason died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1991 at the age of 33. A play based on Mason's work,
Passing Through the Garden
, was produced by Appalshop's Roadside Theater after her death. Her original manuscripts, including a dozen unfinished stories and a novel in progress, are housed in the Special Collections of the University of Kentucky Libraries.

Drama:
Gifts of the Spirit, Appalachian Heritage
16:2&3 (spring/summer 1988).

Short story:
“A Christmas Lesson,”
Appalachian Heritage
15:4 (1987).

Artie Ann Bates, “Belinda, Our Tremendous Gift,”
Appalachian Heritage
19:2 (spring 1991), 3–6 [This essay is reprinted in this volume].
Belinda
, dir. Anne Johnson (Appalshop documentary film, 1992). Philip J. Hilts, “Belinda Mason, 33, U.S. Panelist and Bush Advisor on AIDS Policy,”
New York Times
(10 September 1991), B5, col. 4. Linda Kramer, “AIDS Commissioner Belinda Mason Speaks with Ringing Authority About the Disease,”
People Weekly
32 (11 December 1989), 147–50. “Milestones,”
Time
(23 September 1991), 68. Anne Shelby,
Passing Through the Garden.
Jack Sirica, “Woman on AIDS Panel Dies of AIDS,”
Newsday
(10 September 1991), 8.

from
Appalachian Heritage (1988)

The play is set in the present in a rural eastern Kentucky funeral home. The characters are members of a closely-knit mountain community who have gathered for the evening wake of a young man who has died in a car wreck. As it does so many times in this setting, the characters' thoughts and their talk turns away from death to life
.

Enoch, this speaker, talks of faith. He is about 70, wears khaki work clothes and wing-tip shoes. He is easy going and has a special kind of humor
.

A man's born without a thing and he dies the self-same way. So he's got to make the most of what's in the middle.

Now they's plenty of 'em that would fault me on this, but if the good Lord hadn't a meant for us to enjoy life He'd a took us straight to heaven when we was born and skipped over it.

And look a here what all He's give us:

Children.

Fishin.

Dogwood trees.

Pie.

Them might not be your picks, but they's mine. They's plenty other fine things. Just git ye head out of ye hindend for a minute and think about it.

Music.

Buddies.

Biscuit.

Now I'm not what you'd call a religious man. For I believe religion ain't necessarily limited to the church house. Don't git me wrong though, the church house is good for a lot. When I was a young man I did a sight of courtin at meetings. And in the middle of my years, sometimes there wasn't a thing in the world that was any better than cleanin up, walkin down the creek with Virgie and the younguns and listenin to some preachin. Set of them satiny-smooth benches, spring of the year comin in the winders and the smell of them talcum powders when Virgie'd git that fan goin.

Brother Felix Ison would git wound up. They used to say he preached starvation, instead of salvation. I'd listen to him awhile. Then take note of everbody. My neighbors, I'd think to myself. My family. My friends. Lord, it was sweet. A good feelin. Then maybe I'd put my arm round Virgie and squeeze that soft part of her between the shoulder and the elbow. My hands is old now, but they remember yet holdin that woman's skin.

I've studied on it and I believe now what I loved so good about them times in church is how all of us fit together. As tight and true as a dovetail joint. Must have been somethin to it, for they was certain days in church I even loved my mother-in-law.

Now the truth is that Mag Muncy was a bitch. She worked her husband to death and then set in on her younguns. Cold as ice, that woman. Virgie was her oldest and Mag done her like a pack horse. Course she never could forgive me for takin her. But here I'd set, in back of Mag, filled with somethin that could have been the Holy Ghost for all I know about such matters and they'd be ten minutes spaces of time when I loved Mag. Loved how straight she sat, like she had a poker up her rear. Loved them stringy little plaits around her head. Not seein her old mouth, nothin but a line across her face, and lovin that, too.

But what I meant to say is that they's a lot of 'em that wouldn't pick me for a religious man. I handle bad talk. I'll take a drink. And I ain't never been baptized. Virgie's accused me, more than once, of blasphemin.

Years ago I had Frank Fulton helpin me clear a spot of ground up in the Sandlick Gap. Wadn't nothing up there but a wilderness. We'd worked our tails off, cutting trees, burnin brush, grubbin roots. People thought I'd gone crazy and some said as much. But I knowed underneath all them woods was a fine little house seat. Long about August it started to shape up and it was so pretty I decided I'd build a house for myself.

Little Ted Adams, he was the Presbyterian preacher, he come by one day and was braggin and goin on. I had the footer poured and was fixin to lay the foundation. You could already see what a fine dwellin house I was gonna have. Little Ted said, ‘Now just think, Enoch. All this belongs to you and the Lord.' I said, ‘Well, preacher. You should a seen it when the Lord owned it by His self.' Frank Fulton, he's dead now, told that all over the country.

Now I'm a carpenter and Jesus was too. And I know if He was any hand at all, He paid mind to how things fits together.

If a man's gonna build for it to stand, they's certain things he's got to believe in. You got to believe in the level. You got to have faith in the chalkline. You have to trust the square.

Workin on a buildin is what livin is. And just like wood workin, you got to have things to believe in before you can build something that'll stand. A house that'll keep the wind off of ye. A life where the doors is hung right and the roof don't bow.

And like I said at the outset. The Lord's give us plenty to delight in and a whole lot to believe. If they is a day of judgement comin, as some says, I don't think we'll be faulted much for drinkin or gamblin nor none of the other things you've heard is a one-way ticket to hell. If He's got a quarrel with us, it'll be for us not layin ahold of our tools. Not trustin our materials.

I'm an old man and I figure now it don't matter so much what you believe.

So long as you believe somethin.

The Democrat party.

A good huntin dog.

General Motors products.

The UMW.

They's plenty to pick from.