Listen Here (60 page)

from Kenhawa County

As this famous county is to be a link in the chain which is to connect that part of Virginia east of the mountains with the whole of the western country, I have been at some pains to pick up every thing respecting it. As curiosity leads one to trace things to their origin, such as the history of countries, and remarkable events, I have traced this part of Virginia as far back as the year seventeen hundred and seventy-four, to the memorable battle of the Point [Battle of Point Pleasant, in 1774, a pivotal Revolutionary War battle], fought between the whites and the Indians, at the mouth of this river [the confluence of the Ohio and Kanawha Rivers]. I have seen several men who were in that bloody and hard fought battle, and have just returned from viewing the ground on which it was fought. I have seen that part occupied by the “Augusta militia,” commanded by Gen. Lewis, and that by the Indians. I have seen the bones of the latter sticking in the bank of the Ohio river; part of the bank having fallen in where the battle was fought discloses their bones sticking out in a horizontal position: the engagement lasted from sunrise till dark; the victory was claimed by the whites. From this bank, which is a hundred feet, or thereabouts, in height, I had a view of the beautiful river Ohio: at this place it is said to be five hundred yards wide.

This river, which is justly celebrated for its beauty and utility, flows in a smooth current as silent as night; not the least noise can be heard from it; not the smallest ripple is seen. This, and its limpid appearance, the rich foliage which decorates its banks and looks as though it were growing in the water, by reason of its luxuriance, completely conceals the earth, and constitutes its beauty. If the reader can imagine a vast mirror of endless dimension, he will have an idea of this beautiful river. It is so transparent that you may see pebbles at the bottom; not a rock or stone of any size, has a place in the Ohio. Kenhawa is a very handsome river, being generally as smooth as the Ohio, but by no means so limpid; it has a greenish appearance; you cannot see the bottom, except at the shoals. And more than all this. I have seen the celebrated heroine, Ann Bailey, who richly deserves more of her country, than a name in its history.

This female is a Welch woman, and is now very old. At the time Gen. Lewis's army lay at the Point, a station on Kenhawa river, Ann would shoulder her rifle, hang her shot-pouch over her shoulder, and lead a horse laden with ammunition to the army, two hundred miles distant, when not a man could be found to undertake the perilous task—the way thither being a perfect wilderness, and infested with Indians. I asked her if she was not afraid—she replied, “No, she was not; she trusted in the Almighty—she knew she could only be killed, and she had to die some time.” I asked her if she never met with the Indians in her various journies. (for she went several times.) “Yes, she once met with two, and one of them said to the other let us kill her, (as she supposed, from the answer of the other). No, said his companion, God dam, too good a soger, and let her pass:” but how said I, did you find the way,—“Steered by the trace of Lewis's army, and I had a pocket compass too.” “Well, but how did you get over the water courses?”—Some she forded, and some she swam, on others she made a raft: she “halways carried a hax and a hauger, and she could chop as well has hany man;” such was her dialect. This is a fact that hundreds can attest. A gentleman informed, that while the army was stationed near the mouth of Elk, he walked down that river to where it intersects with Kenhawa, for the purpose of fishing; he had not remained long there before he heard a plunge in the water, and upon looking up, he discovered Ann on horseback swimming toward him; when the horse gained the landing, she observed, “cod, I'd like to a swum.” She was quite a low woman in height, but very strongly made, and had the most pleasing countenance I ever saw, and for her, very affable. “And what would the General say to you, when you used to get safe to camp with your ammunition.” “Why he'd say, you're a brave soldier, Ann, and tell some of the men to give me a dram.” She was fond of a dram. When I saw the poor creature, she was almost naked; she begged a dram, which I gave to her, and also some other trifle. I never shall forget Ann Bailey. The people here repeat many sayings of hers, such as “the howl upon the helm on the bank of the helk”—that is, an owl on an elm upon the bank of Elk river.

(June 6, 1954–)

Cynthia Rylant was born in Hopewell, Virginia, and grew up in the mountains of Raleigh County, West Virginia, surrounded by the warmth of a family who lived on the edge of poverty. She is the daughter of a nurse, Leatrel Rylant, and an army sergeant, John Tune. Her parents divorced when she was young, and she spent some of her childhood with her grandparents while her mother was in nursing school. “I grew up reading comic books because there was no library in my town or in my school, and I did not enter a public library until I was in my twenties,” says Rylant.

Rylant graduated from Morris Harvey College (now University of Charleston) in 1975 with a B.A. in English, then earned an M.A. in English at Marshall University in 1976. After completing a Master's in Library Science at Kent State University in 1982, she worked as a children's librarian in Akron, Ohio, before becoming a full-time writer.

Rylant has won numerous awards, including a Newbery Award in 1993 for her young adult novel,
Missing May.
Her first book,
When I Was Young in the Mountains
was a Caldecott Honor Book, as was
The Relatives Came.
She received the 1991
Boston Globe–Horn
Book Award for nonfiction for
Appalachia: The Voices of Sleeping Birds.

Her childhood experiences left her with a special affinity for the underdog. “I get a lot of personal gratification thinking of those people who don't get any attention in the world and making them really valuable in my fiction—making them absolutely shine with their beauty.”

Rylant currently lives in Oregon with her son, Nate. Her selected papers, including multiple drafts of many of her works, are held by the Special Collections Department in the university library at Kent State.

The following excerpt is the opening chapter of
Missing May
, in which Summer faces the death of her foster mother, May, and the grief of May's husband, Ob.

Selected picture books:
Poppleton Everyday
(1998),
Tulip Sees America
(1998),
Bear Day
(1998),
Scarecrow
(1997),
Silver Packages: An Appalachian Christmas Story
(1997),
Cat Heaven
(1997),
An Angel for Solomon Singer
(1992),
Mr. Grigg's Work
(1989),
All I
See (1988),
Birthday Presents
(1987),
Night in the
Country (1986),
The Relatives Came
(1985),
This Year's Garden
(1984),
Miss Maggie
(1983),
When I Was Young In the Mountains
(1982), and more than a dozen books in the Henry and Mudge series.
Fiction for children:
Missing May
(1992),
Appalachia: The Voices of Sleeping Birds
(1991),
A Couple of Kooks: And Other Stories about Love
(1990),
A Kindness
(1989),
A Fine White Dust
( 1986),
Every Living Thing
(1985),
Blue-Eyed Daisy
(1985).
Poetry for children:
Good Morning Sweetie Pie and Other Poems for Little Children
(2002),
Soda Jerk
(1990),
Waiting to Waltz
(1984).
Autobiography:
“Newbery Medal Acceptance,”
The Horn Book Magazine
69:4 (July/August 1993), 416–19.
But I'll Be Back Again
(1989). Anita Silvey, “An Interview with Cynthia Rylant,”
The Horn Book Magazine
63:6 (November/December 1987), 695–702.

George Brosi, “New Books,”
Appalachian Heritage
20:3 (summer 1992), 79.
Contemporary Authors
, Vol. 136, 357–58.
Something about the Author
(1991), Vol. 13, 155–63.
Something About the Author
(1992), Vol. 13, 155–63; Vol. 50, 182–88; Vol. 76, 193–99. Diane Ward, “Cynthia Rylant,”
The Horn Book Magazine
69:4 (July/August 1993), 420–23.

Chapter One

When May died, Ob came back to the trailer, got out of his good suit and into his regular clothes, then went and sat in the Chevy for the rest of the night. That old car had been parked out by the doghouse for as long as I could remember, and the weeds had grown up all around it so you didn't even notice it unless you looked, and for years I couldn't understand why Ob didn't just get rid of the awful thing. Until I saw him sitting in it after the funeral. Then I knew that even though nobody in the world figured that old car had any good purpose, Ob knew there was some real reason to let it sit. And when May died, he figured out what it was.

I never saw two people love each other so much. Sometimes the tears would just come over me, looking at the two of them, even six years back when I first got here and was too young to be thinking about love. But I guess I must have had a deep part of me thinking about it, hoping to see it all along, because the first time I saw Ob help May braid her long yellow hair, sitting in the kitchen one night, it was all I could do not to go to the woods and cry forever from happiness.

I know I must have been loved like that, even if I can't remember it. I must have; otherwise, how could I even recognize love when I saw it that night between Ob and May? Before she died, I know my mother must have loved to comb my shiny hair and rub that Johnson's baby lotion up and down my arms and wrap me up and hold and hold me all night long. She must have known she wasn't going to live and she must have held me longer than any other mother might, so I'd have enough love in me to know what love was when I saw it or felt it again.

When she died and all her brothers and sisters passed me from house to house, nobody ever wanting to take care of me for long, I still had that lesson in love deep inside me and I didn't grow mean or hateful when nobody cared enough to make me their own little girl. My poor mother had left me enough love to go on until somebody did come along who'd want me.

Then Uncle Ob and Aunt May from West Virginia visited, and they knew an angel when they saw her and they took me on home.

Home was, still is, a rusty old trailer stuck on the face of a mountain in Deep Water, in the heart of Fayette County. It looked to me, the first time, like a toy that God had been playing with and accidentally dropped out of heaven. Down and down and down it came and landed, thunk, on this mountain, sort of cockeyed and shaky and grateful to be all in one piece. Well, sort of one piece. Not counting that part in the back where the aluminum's peeling off, or the one missing window, or the front steps that are sinking.

That first night in it with Ob and May was as close to paradise as I may ever come in my life. Paradise because these two old people—who never dreamed they'd be bringing a little girl back from their visit with the relatives in Ohio—started, from the minute we pulled up in Ob's old Valiant, to turn their rusty, falling-down place into a house just meant for a child. May started talking about where they'd hang the swing as soon as she hoisted herself out of the front seat (May was a big woman), and Ob was designing a tree house in his head before he even got the car shut off. I was still so sick to my stomach from traveling all those curvy West Virginia roads that all I could do was swallow and nod, swallow and nod. Try to smile without puking.

But when we got inside the trailer, it became plain to me at once that they didn't need to do any great changing to make a little girl happy. First thing I saw when May switched on the light were those shelves and shelves—seemed every wall was covered with them—of whirligigs. I knew what they were right off even though they weren't like any whirligigs I'd ever seen. Back in Ohio people had them hooked to their fences or stuck out in their gardens to scare off the birds. And they'd be mostly the same everywhere: a roadrunner whose legs spun in the wind, or maybe a chicken or a duck. Cartoon characters were popular—Garfield was in a lot of gardens with his arms whirling like crazy in the breeze.

I'd seen plenty of whirligigs, but never any like Ob's. Ob was an artist—I could tell that the minute I saw them—though
artist
isn't the word I could have used back then, so young. None of Ob's whirligigs were farm animals or cartoon characters. They were
The Mysteries.
That's what Ob told me, and I knew just what he was talking about. One whirligig was meant to be a thunderstorm and it was so like one, black and gray, beautiful and frightening. Another was Ob's idea of heaven, and I thought his angels just might come off that thing and fly around that house trailer any minute, so golden and light were they. There was Fire and Love and Dreams and Death. Even one called May, which had more little spinning parts than any of the rest of the whirligigs, and these parts all white—her Spirit, he said. They were grounded to a branch from an oak tree and this, he said, was her Power.

I stood there before those shelves, watching these wonders begin to spin as May turned on the fan overhead, and I felt like a magical little girl, a chosen little girl, like Alice who has fallen into Wonderland. This feeling has yet to leave me.

And as if the whirligigs weren't enough, May turned me to the kitchen, where she pulled open all the cabinet doors, plus the refrigerator, and she said, “Summer, whatever you like you can have and whatever you like that isn't here Uncle Ob will go down to Ellet's Grocery and get you. We want you to eat, honey.”

Back in Ohio, where I'd been treated like a homework assignment somebody was always having to do, eating was never a joy of any kind. Every house I had ever lived in was so particular about its food, and especially when the food involved me. There's no good way to explain this. But I felt like one of those little mice who has to figure out the right button to push before its food will drop down into the cup. Caged and begging. That's how I felt sometimes.

My eyes went over May's wildly colorful cabinets, and I was free again. I saw Oreos and Ruffles and big bags of Snickers. Those little cardboard boxes of juice that I had always, just once, wanted to try. I saw fat bags of marshmallows and cans of SpaghettiOs and a little plastic bear full of honey. There were real glass bottles of Coke looking cold as ice in the refrigerator and a great big half of a watermelon taking up space. And, best of all, a carton of real chocolate milk that said Hershey's.

Whirligigs of Fire and Dreams, glistening Coke bottles and chocolate milk cartons to greet me. I was six years old and I had come home.