Listen Here (52 page)

Cabin Homes

“Poor people has a poor way.”

Solitude is deep water, and small boats do not ride well in it. Only a superficial observer could fail to understand that the mountain people really love their wilderness—love it for its beauty, for its freedom. Their intimacy with it dates from a babyhood when the thrill of clean wet sand was good to little feet; when “frog-houses” were built, and little tracks were printed in rows all over the shore of the creek; when the beginnings of aesthetic feeling found expression in necklaces of scarlet haws and headresses pinned and braided together of oak leaves, cardinal flowers and fern; when beargrass in spring, “sarvices” and berries in summer and muscadines in autumn were first sought after and prized most for the “wild flavor,” the peculiar tang of the woods which they contain.

I once rode up the Side with a grandmother from Sawyers' Springs, who cried out, as the overhanging curve of the bluff, crowned with pines, came into view: “Now, ain't that finer than any picter you ever seed in your life?—and they call us pore mountaineers! We git more out o' life than anybody.”

“There's more marries than keeps cold meat.”

The best society in the mountains—that is to say, the most interesting—is that of the young married men and that of the older women. The young people are so shy that they can hardly be said to form a part of society at all. They are hedged with conventions and meet almost as formally as young Japanese. For example, on entering church the men are expected to turn to the left and seat themselves, and the women to the right. It is permitted a young fellow who is avowedly out courting to sit beside his “gal,” but I cannot imagine what would happen if a young woman were to place herself on the men's side of the house.

After marriage something of the young man's shyness wears off; he gradually loses his awe of the opposite sex, and even within the conventions he finds room for intelligent conversation. Then he begins to be interesting, for his twenty-odd years of outdoor experience have really taught him much. As for the woman, it is not until she has seen her own boys grown to be men that she loses entirely the bashfulness of her girlhood, and the innate beauty and dignity of her nature shines forth in helpfulness and counsel.

I have learned to enjoy the company of these old prophetesses almost more than any other. The range of their experience is wonderful; they are, moreover, repositories of tribal lore—tradition and song, medical and religious learning. They are the nurses, the teachers of practical arts, the priestesses, and their wisdom commands the respect of all. An old woman has usually more authority over the bad boys of a household than all the strength of man. A similar reverence may have been accorded to the mothers of ancient Israel, as it is given by all peoples to those of superior holiness—to priests, teachers, nuns; it is not the result of affection, still less of fear.

(September 15, 1939–)

Poet and novelist Heather Ross Miller was born in Albemarle, North Carolina. Both her father, Fred Ross, and her uncle, James Ross, were novelists, and Miller's aunt Eleanor, herself a poet, married acclaimed fiction writer Peter Taylor. “I took it as natural,” says Miller, “this business of finding stories and poems in everyday affairs.”

Miller earned her B.A. in English in 1961 and her M.F.A. in 1969, both from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She also did postgraduate work in modern drama and cinema at the University of London, and taught at several North Carolina colleges, as well as at the University of Arkansas. In 1984, she was awarded an honorary Ph.D. from Methodist College in Fayetteville, North Carolina.

Her first novel,
The Edge of the Woods
, published in 1964, won the National Association of Independent Schools Best Book Award for that year. Critics lauded the novel for its lyrical style. One reviewer wrote, “Hers is a truly individual style which, though drawing in a rather original manner on Biblical imagery, in no way suggests any recognizable imitation of her literary elders.”

Miller has gone on to publish more than a dozen books and has contributed to periodicals ranging from the
New York Times
to
Vogue.
Miller says, “I want the stories, the poems, to be natural. I am a Southern woman, and I write about the places that flavor me.” Since 1992, she has been the Thomas Broadus Professor of English at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.

In the following scene from
The Edge of the Woods
, Miller's first novel, we meet Anna Marie Wade, an observant child being raised by her grandparents.

Novels:
Champeen
(1999),
Gone a Hundred Miles
(1968),
Tenants of the House
(1966),
The Edge of the Woods
(1964).
Stories:
In the Funny Papers: Stories
(1995),
A Spiritual Divorce and Other Stories
(1974),
Delphi: A Collection of Stories
(1969).
Poetry:
Days of Love and Murder: Poems
(1999),
Friends and Assassins
(1993),
Hard Evidence: Poems
(1990),
Adam's First Wife
(1983),
Therapia
(1982),
Horse Horse, Tyger Tyger
(1973),
The Wind Southerly
(1967).
Memoir:
Crusoe's Island: The Story of a Writer and A Place
(2000).
Autobiographical essay:
“A Natural History,” in
Bloodroot
(1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 193–99.

Contemporary Authors
, New Revision Series, Vol. 5, 372–73. Joyce Dyer, “Heather Ross Miller,” in
Bloodroot
, 192. Lottie H. Swink, “Heather Ross Miller,”
Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary
(1979), 307–8.

from Chapter 1

Here is my name across the top line of my copy book: Anna Marie Wade, born September twenty-third, in the time of the autumnal equinox, when day and night are everywhere on earth of equal length. And winter approaches. In the night, the wind changes and brings frost with morning, turning the songbirds southward. The blood-red bead in the thermometer slowly descends. And Paw Paw will have to poke up the fire, showering the hearth with crimson sparkles.

“Listen! It's a snow fire,” he says, holding the poker stiffly upright, like a toy soldier at attention.

My brother and I look up from our lessons and strain our ears to hear the soft crunch, crunch, shoo-ish of the flame that Paw Paw says sounds like a man walking on a crust of snow.

Grandmother is brushing out her hair for bed. Long pearl-grey strands rippling down her shimmy like a dim waterfall, a mist, her brush racing through it, making little electric crackles in the soft, drowsy room.

“Whoo-ee,” she says, stopping a moment, the hair floating over her face like a dingy cloud. “I'm all give out in my back. One of you younguns come over here and finish my hair for me. Anna'Ree?”

I close my copy book and put my yellow pencil in the washed-out iodine bottle which holds all our pencils and pieces of pencil, pins, rubber bands, and such. Grandmother's hair feels dry and soft in my hand, strangely impersonal and unalive, like the thick hair of our shaggy shepherd, a cloak that could be thrown off at any moment and reveal the naked flesh beneath. I let it slide through my fingers, grey, white, a few rivulets of dull gold, a mantle of salt-and-pepper, Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your golden hair, Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your golden stair.

“Comb and brush until it flows like silken threads,” sighs Miss Jen, nodding against the wicker chair. “Like silken threads.”

She is asleep, dreaming under my hands, swept away on the old grey flood of her hair. An old Rapunzel, with no more flax to spin into gold, no prince to climb again upon her stair, no tower, and no witch of darkness.

In the corner, Paw Paw yawns over his Bible, tracing out each line under a rough old finger, each word flowing under his thick black nail, the flimsy pages pressed under a palm horny with calluses. He dozes, like Grandmother, but swept away on a different flood, just as old and perhaps more turbulent.

Once, when I was still quite young, still in loose ginghams and wearing long yellow braids, back before my brother was really a person, I sat in my grandfather's Sunday School. Cedar Grove had only a one-room, white, wooden, Methodist Church and there were dark heavy curtains, like burlap, strung on rails to divide off the classes. The screech of those curtains rings skittering along the rail would always put my teeth on edge and make the skin of my neck prickle. I sat beside Miss Jen, feeling her bosom blossom and sink under the Sunday voile, the straw buds of her bonnet trembling like tiny yellow cornucopias around the pale flush of her brow. It was quite warm and the windows were open, letting in every fly, wasp, and bumblebee from each mile of thick country garden and crop land that lay spread out like a fan around the church.

I was nervous for Paw Paw. I'd never heard him speak in front of folks before, and he seemed awfully out of place to me, standing up there small and stiff in his black vest, the clump of white hairs that sprouted from a mole on his chin quivering like thistles in dew, and his eyes watering. He took up the Bible and began, something from Psalms.

Blessed
is he whose
transgression
is
forgiven,
whose
sin is covered….

Rejoice in the Lord, O ye righteous, for praise is comely to the upright. Praise the Lord with harp: sing unto him with the psaltery
and
an instrument of ten strings.

He was one of those people who gave deep Biblical emphasis to any words that were printed in italics. He could not have known that the Jacobean translators simply could not render every word of God into the King's English. Paw Paw was unlettered, but not illiterate. He never got beyond the fifth grade in formal schooling. There just wasn't any for him. And the lessons of the land had to be learned first. Before the letters of the alphabet, a man must know seedtime and harvest, the phases of the moon, and how to cure hog meat that would keep through winter. And the mysteries of numbers were to be found in penny nails or bushel baskets, in acres and bales and how much hard cash was tied up in the middle of a greasy handkerchief.

I should have trusted him more that Sunday. His voice was strong and his eye firm. King David himself could have done no better than Paw Paw at Cedar Grove. But maybe I was only a child, and very impressionable, like warm wax.

from
Friends and Assassins
(1993)

We spread in the grass and slit clover
with a thumbnail, slid one stem
through another, hinged like long lovers,
locked death mates, sucking
the tight white knots
of dead persistent flowers.
We said we'd have it all,
bridesmaids, babies, hot abundant nectars
the magazines promised like Aretha
singing off our mother's radios,
chainchain—
chain!

chainchain—

chain!
Chain of
fooooools!

That was our flowering period,
unlucky three-leafed,
each one an unwed
troublesome weed
of a girl
growing April through October,
chaining clover, easy as cattle
in good pasture.

from
Hard Evidence
(1990)

I've had enough of making bread go around,
slapping it, pat-a-caking me to death. But.
Nowhere do I find me so painstakingly
real and rising, leavening each hour
but in this salt, yeast, and cool unblanched flour.
Over the dough bowl, my loony face sifts,
takes shape and lifts. My thumbs search
the elements and my fist blends
the taste of a real presence.
I'd like to waste it, starve people,
go to bed and sleep a year. But.
The oven heats up right
and I wait wait wait.
Crumbs and little bones, sweet dark-curling peels
pile my table, seal the plates. I set out more,
pour cups, catch fish, rob bees to fill up
hungrier, hungrier brothers, nursing all these
on my one lovely body. Never enough.
I make myself go around. Starting over,
I measure and stir, punch the blind stuff
to make it grow. Somebody's tears fall in,
teasing the helpless dough.
Stop it, brothers.
I've got life up to the elbow.

(April 29, 1939–)

Poet Janice Townley Moore has lived in Hayesville, in the western North Carolina mountains, and in north Georgia, where she has taught classes in writing and literature at Young Harris College since 1963. She says, “No matter what the subject, the mountains sometimes slip into my poems. The seasons and moods of this region, along with the native wildlife, have definitely given my poems a sense of place.”

She earned her B.A. from LaGrange College in 1961 and her M.A. from Auburn University in 1963. She studied further at Emory University, Georgia State University, University of Virginia, and North Georgia College. From 1985 to 1997, she served as poetry editor for
Georgia Journal
and in 1996 co-edited
Like a Summer Peach: Sunbright Poems and Old Southern Recipes.

Her work has appeared in a variety of anthologies and literary journals including
The Georgia Review, Southern Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple, The Bedford Introduction to Literature
, and
Old Wounds, New Words.

Edited book:
Like a Summer Peach: Sunbright Poems & Old Southern Recipes
(1996).
Poetry:
Windows Filled with Gifts
(unpublished collection).

Michael J. Bugeja, “Keep Your Senses Alive in Writing,”
Poet's Market
(1994).