Oral History (9781101565612) (15 page)

Wall Johnson smiled then, a huge young giant of evident good will, and I relaxed.

“Splendid!” I said, and we loaded all my bags into the back of his rattletrap truck. A young girl sat back there too, wrapped up against the weather.

“Doesn't she want to sit up here with us?” I asked. “Won't she be cold during this long ride?”

“Nope,” Wall Johnson said. “Ain't that far nohow.”

He started the engine. Turning in my seat, I looked back past his rifle in the gun rack and through the cracked glass window. The girl sat among the boxes of foodstuffs and hardware, with her face turned away from us, watching the dust we raised, I suppose, with our passage. Her hair was curly and abundant, a warm vibrant brown. As I could elicit no conversation from the grinning imbecile beside me in the truck, I fell to fancying, idly, the girl's face—giving her all Melissa's most attractive attributes, yet correcting Melissa's flaws—in my mind's eye I created for this unknown girl a Grecian nose rather than Melissa's shallow little upturned snout, for instance. The road we traveled, which is indeed the only artery into this remote area, is terrible. At times it is so narrow that one conveyance must stop in order to let an oncoming vehicle pass. At other times, the ground falls away beside the road in what appears to be a sheer drop. The grade is often unbelievably steep. From the windows I could glimpse the many small cabins, set up on hillsides so sheer that I believe for the first time my great-uncle Aston's anecdote about the mountaineer who fell out of his cornfield and broke his leg. The mountains rise steeply here to their high and often rocky crests. An occasional gray outcropping of rock can be glimpsed.

The lovely trees, beginning now to sport their bright fall colors, often meet to form a lovely canopy over the road. Several times we rounded a dangerous curve to be rewarded by a remarkable, sweeping vista. Wall Johnson appeared to be entirely engrossed in his driving, however, and in the cigarettes he smoked one after the other, rolling them expertly between the yellowed fingers of his right hand. I could not tell his age: 25? 30? 35? I wondered whether the girl in the back of the truck were his daughter or his wife. Thus occupied, I passed the ride in a trancelike state of speculation, and wonderment at the beauties of nature unrolling before my eyes. At length we crossed a particularly frightening mountain and jolted down into town.

Black Rock appeared to conform in every particular to my great-aunt's and uncle's descriptions of it, a fairly well-kept if ramshackle little village, houses and stores which run the length of Main Street, pleasant trees at intervals, two churches, a fairly new stone courthouse with a kind of tower and a clock, and the broad deep river which runs along beside everything and then rounds the bend out of sight. The river is full of logs. So beautiful this little town, like a town of fifty years ago, an idealized kind of town. A person could live here, certainly. A person could more than make do. I imagined box suppers, bingo games, hoedowns, the hearty jolly peasantry of these hills.

“I said I'll be seeing you.” My driver startled me. He stood beside his truck, having dumped my luggage rather unceremoniously there in the dirt by the raised plank sidewalk, right in the middle of town.

I must have shown my surprise.

“Yer school.” The huge idiot grinned. “Hit's over thar in the holler whar we-unses is. I reckon I'll see you,” he said, and I said, “I reckon so,” all the time wondering why in the devil he had kept this information to himself so long. A kind of perversity, a cunning? He had known who I was all along! Yet he had seemed open and friendly enough, in his rather opaque fashion. He jumped back in his truck and rattled away, and as I turned to watch him go, I received the greatest shock of my journey thus far. The girl in the back of the truck, whose beauty I had occupied myself in imagining all that torturous last leg of my trip, this girl looked up at me then, and grinned. She was hideous. A purple birthmark covered nearly half of her face, and her left eye, somewhat larger than her right, wandered off to focus on something beyond me, yet the right eye stayed fixed on mine. “Bye-bye!” she called, waving childishly. I could but feebly respond. Was she his daughter, sister, wife? I could form no clear conjecture. I watched the truck traverse the length of Main Street and head off into the hinterlands beyond, those remote and unimaginable hinterlands which I shall come to know so soon myself.

 

I put up here, at the Smith Hotel, which is nothing more than a glorified—and only slightly glorified, at that—boardinghouse, run by a widow, the blowsy Mrs. Justine Poole, a plumpish woman with a disconcertingly loud laugh. “We eat at six,” she said, leading me up to my room. “You look plumb tuckered out,” she said, and with a start, I realized that it was so. And why not? precious little sleep, and this long uncomfortable journey. I unpacked my belongings, actually placing shirts and underwear in the bureau drawers provided.
I mean to do this; I mean to stay
. It is difficult for me to believe. The bed is lumpy, with rumpled unprepossessing sheets. There is one bare hanging lightbulb, and another lamp which springs like a ghastly glass clamshell from the wall. Neither of these two—or even combined—affords adequate light for reading. I have resolved to ask for a table lamp, the table here in the corner being sturdy and adequate, actually, for all the writing I shall expect to do. A small wavy mirror hangs on the wall, above the shaving stand upon which has been placed the requisite bowl and a pitcher of water. Plumbing, one presumes, exists. I must go down the hall, however, and share the facilities with the other boarders of the Smith Hotel. Primitive! I imagine, for a second, Melissa—
here!
Impossible. Yet I suppose I am lucky. For when the term begins and I go to board with the parents of my students, I shall encounter homes with outhouses or even—according to Aunt Lucille, who devoted her last years to the County Health—homes where the inhabitants freely use the nearby woods and have never known any sanitary facilities at all! So I have resolved to keep this room, however unpromising it may appear at this moment, in the knowledge that worse is probably in store, and I shall need a restorative haven, a refuge, in the months to come. Perhaps Mrs. Poole can find me a bookcase....

Enough, enough. I have written away the end of the afternoon. From my window I look down upon the sleepy town square surrounded as it is by these harsh mountains. I see the shopkeepers locking up now and heading home, an occasional bright leaf spiraling downward to land unnoticed upon a sober dark hat, a somber coat. Why do I want to weep? Earlier today Mrs. Poole said I look “plumb tuckered out,” and yet my nerves feel so jangled that I am certain I shall never sleep again. I have the sense of standing upon some precipitous verge which will alter the course of my life. I believe in God, yes—Victor notwithstanding. I believe in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. I believe that nothing happens at random, that we all of us fill a role in His master plan. Each act, each occurrence in our lives has its significance: at least I
want
to believe these things. Thus I am stymied and puzzled by these “signs” which I have recorded herein. I refer to the old woman whose meal I shared on the train in that magical dead-of-night, to the bloody-mouthed old fellow receiving such rudimentary dental care there by the tracks, and to the deformed girl who smiled and waved at me so enthusiastically from the back of the storekeeper's truck. Are these, indeed, portents? What do they signify? But I am suddenly weary of portents and of significance. I want no more portents. As someone said, “Bring on the bear!” Yet even as I write these words, I know them to be uncharacteristic. What is happening to me? Whatever it is has already begun. I hear laughter below, voices rising. A dinnerbell clangs. I stand and don my coat. Yet still I see them in my mind's eye: that old woman, that horrible girl. The wallpaper in this room bears a repeated pattern of faded violets gathered up into a kind of corsage, tied with a bow. These sprigs recur, and recur, and recur. God knows when they were put here, or by whom.

I shall descend for the evening meal.

I am all but overcome at the impossibility of the task which lies ahead. I make this entry in the lovely late afternoon, in my one-room “schoolhouse,” as it is called, after my “students” have left for home. Following tradition, I am boarding, this month, with a local family, the Justices. At the weekend, I return to Black Rock, to my dim yet increasingly well-appreciated room at the Smith Hotel, to a hot (and weekly!) bath, and to Mrs. Poole's delicious, as it turns out, rice pudding. I make this entry here, I repeat, in the schoolhouse, because I can find no privacy at all in the Justice cabin, where, according to long-standing custom, everyone sleeps in one room. This is the home of Harve Justice, mountain farmer, cabinet- and coffin-maker and whittler
par excellence
, his silent scrawny wife, Hildy, and their three sons.

The food there is abominable: boiled beef, tough as brogans; thick flat peas; sticky yams with an acrid, burned taste; green beans cooked to death in a kind of greasy gruel; and the ubiquitous cornbread which appears at every meal. More like some kind of seed-cake than like a raised bread, made from the ground corn they have grown themselves, this is the family staple in these hills. No wonder that these people, often handsome and hardy in youth, sicken and die so soon! Their diet is not only inedible but appalling from a nutritional standpoint (sanitary precautions being, of course, unknown . . .).

Last Wednesday afternoon I entered the cabin to find a particularly vile odor rampant in the close air. “What's that I smell?” I inquired of Mrs. Justice, who started violently (these mountain women are unused to conversations with men) before replying: “Hit's sallet!” she said. Salad! I thought. At last! I could all but taste the crisp green lettuce on my tongue, when reason again took over. “Salad!” I cried. “How wonderful! But what's that I smell?” “Hit's sallet,” she said again, and set her mouth, and refused to answer any more questions. So the peculiar odor remained a nauseating mystery until Harve and the boys returned from squirrel-hunting and she served us our dinner, which turned out to be, as prophesied, “sallet” indeed: a rank oniony collection of mountain greenery collected on the slopes and cooked to death with a piece of pork. “Hit's creasy-greens,” Harve said, and mentioned several other unfamiliar names. Despite the Justices' great hospitality—hospitality being, indeed, the rule among these people, who never pass each other on the trail without an invitation to “come along home”—despite it, I say, I am resolved to obtain a bed-tick and a few other items of convenience and sleep right here in this school room during the school week, largely in order to fend off my own imminent starvation!

Also, I feel that in so doing, I shall be better able to keep in mind the rather lofty ideals and desires which brought me here in the first place. Good intentions so easily disappear, I find, when they come face to face with the exigencies of comfort. And I have been brought here, I repeat, by more than mere “good intentions,” a phrase too wish-washy to have any meaning within these four rough walls.

My “schoolhouse”: a “puncheon” floor, as it's called, logs split halfway, laid side by side; rough log walls, with the mud “chinking” in need of some repair before winter comes; a squat black woodstove which reminds me, for some reason, of a funny little foreign man; a chalkboard; a beautiful oak desk made by hand by Harve Justice, my erstwhile host; and the roughly built benches on either side of the center aisles, and the long wooden tables covered with carvings put there by several generations of schoolchildren. Schoolchildren! the very term conjures up a vision of happy youth, and although some of the children conform to this ideal, most of these “students” emphatically do not, resembling, instead, wizened and already woebegone grownups who expect nothing more from life than the subsistence their parents have torn from these mountains. I have no children at all over the age of ten or eleven, although I encounter plenty of older school-age children as I come and go, to and from the Justice cabin to the schoolhouse, or back to Black Rock at the weekend. The eleven- and twelve-year-olds are judged to have had “enough schooling,” most of them, unless they are considered exceptionally “smart,” in which case they are sent over to Black Rock to board and attend school there—the only upper school in the county. But most of them quit at about age eleven. The girls are put to work in house and field for a year or two until they marry, which they do at appallingly tender ages. The boys go to work on the farms or in the last few of the lumber camps which have denuded this virgin forest of all its best and mightiest trees, or they are sent down into the coal mines where often their small size allows them to chisel out the dark ore from the lowest, the smallest and most dangerous seams. Union regulations prohibit child labor, of course, yet these are small nonunion mines, the mountaineers here being, it is said, too cantankerous to organize! But also it is true that the large coal mines are all across the neighboring state lines, in Kentucky and West Virginia. This is a poor, poor land, where even the sketchy soil holds no rich secret. Oh, it is a black life I picture, and yet, in all honesty, I have to admit that the brightest often do go on to school. From boarding in Black Rock and attending the high school there, some of them have traveled on to colleges and then to distinguished careers in varied professions throughout the state, and indeed, the country. Few, it is sad to say, choose to return. And among my boys and girls I can already pick out the few who will go on perhaps, and the many others who will stay. It breaks my heart! It breaks my heart to read aloud to them, for instance, as I did today—we are reading, together, aloud,
Robinson Crusoe
—and see the light which comes to their quick little eyes and know how soon, for how many, it will be extinguished. (I have been thinking today how images of light have for so long been associated with learning, with religion, and with love. . . .)