Oral History (9781101565612) (19 page)

I do digress.

I stand by the door as they come, and no bells ring, and yet they all converge as one. This coming to church is a happy thing—as witness the skipping children along the path, the timid smiles on the worn faces of these hard-working homebound women, the proud silence of the men. Meeting brings not only respite from work, but also affords one of the few opportunities available for socializing.

On my first day here, they indeed looked askance, but the Justices greeted me warmly, or at any rate as warmly as I imagine they will ever greet anybody, and several of the schoolchildren came up to take my hand and giggle (it is strange how the innate warmth and friendliness of these little children appears to change so drastically, and suddenly, into the poker-faced taciturnity of the adults), and after that first service, the venerable Mrs. Rhoda Hibbitts (Granny Hibbitts) came up to squint nearsightedly at me and ask me whether I had “not got nuthin' better to do on a Sunday,” and when I smiled and said no, I had not, she flashed her toothless jack-o'-lantern grin at me and said she “reckoned,” then, that I might as well “come on back.”

The women take one side and the men the other, as I said. The Hibbitts “girls”—Louella and the other one who is “tetched” but nonetheless boasts a lovely voice—begin the song, some old traditional hymn like “Washed in the Blood of the Lamb” or “Bringing in the Sheaves” or “There Is a Green Hill Far Away,” singing in the high nasal mountain manner, with sometimes the accompaniment of dulcimer or mandolin, as played by old man Luther Wade or his son Little Luther Wade (a partially crippled young man whom, you may be sure, I have carefully observed!) or, perhaps, old Hester Little. The message, such as it is when “brought” by the sweating red-faced apoplectic Autry Lily, is usually no more than gibberish, concentrating upon the evils and rigors of hell, pictured in great and gruesome detail, and the availability of “salvation” through the “blood of Jesus Christ.” Gore and violence are the order of the day in these sermons, which Autry Lily delivers in a high-pitched kind of shriek, punctuated by the traditional sharp intake of breath, these two noises combining upon occasion to produce a sort of incantatory rhythm broken by such remarks as “Tell it, Autry!” and “Lord, Lord!” shouted out by the congregation, men and women alike. For here is a phenomenon: this most expressionless of people, who pride themselves—even my schoolchildren—in showing neither hunger, nor pain, nor grief—these people certainly “let go” in church. At length the women begin rocking back and forth, there is a kind of collective sobbing, and often someone will rush forward at the invitation to be “saved from the fiery pit of hell and them little old licking flames,” as Autry Lily pictures it in his characteristic language. On my third visit to meeting, one of the Ramey boys, a thin anemic-looking teen-aged fellow who goes by the peculiar nomenclature of Peter Junior, leapt forward sobbing, and this service was followed by the entire congregation's pilgrimage down to Meeting House Branch where Brother Lily baptized Peter Junior on the spot, beneath the icy rushing waters of the creek. He came up white as a sheet and shivering violently—his being “saved,” I presume, the ultimate consolation in the face of that pneumonia which I was quite sure he would contract as a result of his salvation.

A further word about salvation: it has to do
only
with one's emotional sense of “being saved.” It has nothing to do, apparently, with any notion of living a “good life,” as I was brought up to believe a Christian ought to do: hence, all the apparent contradictions. The most evil man imaginable could, theoretically, be “saved” on his deathbed. What one does in this world “don't hold a candle to Jesus' blood” (!) as Autry Lily put it in one of his stranger images. Only occasionally does the concept of salvation have anything to do with the reality of daily life: once a Blankenship was “preached” from this pulpit for his public drunkenness. But rarely do the two coincide.

In some meetings, I am told, people speak in tongues. Some meetings use a snake to determine “true faith,” allowing it to twine about the entire congregation. No one who “believes” will be bitten! Aldous Rife has told me that he witnessed one camp meeting at which a woman actually bared her breast to the snake (which did not bite it). At any rate, I understand that this is a “foot-washing” congregation, although this ceremony has not been practiced yet in my presence, due possibly to that very presence. I am still a foreigner here. But I expect that foot-washing will occur if I persevere, which I continue to do, the only detriment to my presence being the somewhat “off” daughter of Granny Hibbitts. She has begun to stare at me so strangely, muttering under her breath, and yet when I met her on the path to Tug last Tuesday A.M. and said “Good morning,” she burst into tears and raced away! She bothers me. It bothers me that she is a member of this congregation. In every other respect, however, I feel I am making progress.

Now. I was describing a typical Sunday service—any Sunday in November. After the singing, and the praying and the preaching and the moaning and the crying out, after all this, when the meeting is concluded with everyone venturing back to their homes in what I would assume to be vast trepidation that indeed He will come to “judge the quick and the dead”—instead of the trepidation and apprehension I would expect to be occasioned by such an awesome final injunction, I see
joy
, real joy, upon the faces leaving this meeting house. It is as if God's eraser has wiped each slate, has smoothed each brow, has calmed each soul. Something real is here at work, as I have reported to Aldous Rife, who did not disagree. (Aldous appears to disagree with
nothing
, however: to leave all his options distressingly open, or perhaps distressingly closed?)

But something real is here. I feel it as I stand in the wind before the meeting house at the close of meeting, as I see the people move forth once again into their lives. They are indeed, as they say, “sanctified.” I do not understand it. I do understand however that I, who have spent my life in “being good,” I who was christened in a long white gown in the hallowed nave of St. Stephen's Church, Richmond, and who was then baptized effetely in the Episcopal manner—I have not been sanctified. Nor am I “saved.” Rather am I a sojourner, as old Aldous referred to me, merely a sojourner here, standing outside this little meeting house in the biting November wind at the close of worship. I am resolved to attempt to “open my soul to God” and “let him in,” although I face this decision with a great sense of inner trembling, really with a kind of dread, for I deeply fear the loss of control. And yet I sense it to be a prerequisite for the kind of emotional experience these people deem necessary to salvation, what they call “taking a great through.”

And why not? I have eternity to gain and naught to lose! A “revival” is to occur here shortly and I am resolved to attend, to give myself over, insofar as possible, to these sentiments.

And so I leave the meeting house a sojourner still, with my collar turned up and my hat pulled down against the wind, a sojourner not only in the symbolic sense, as are we all, caught here between birth and death, and doubt and belief, and evil and good, but a sojourner in the most literal sense of that term, as I am between places, between the meeting house and my schoolroom-home, or between my schoolroom-home and my rented room in the Smith Hotel in Black Rock, or between the mountains and the flatlands whence I came, or—as the Cherokees said, and this applies to all this lovely hazy land—“between the mountains and the sky”!

My mind whirls, it churns and eddies like the angry brown floodtide which even now rips through the “holler” outside my schoolhouse with such abandon, carrying off stumps, logs, and—just a moment ago—a wooden crate with a hen on top, clucking wildly. Although the rain has ceased, the stream shows no sign of diminishing—water, I imagine, continues to gush down from the mountains into the freshets which feed the stream.

O God!!! Why do I go on—and on!—about “freshets which feed the stream”? O God.

This is what happened:

She came to me today, and we kissed, and we almost made love.
Would have so done
, in fact, but for the accident of rising water and her brothers coming to take her home!

It was the fourth straight day of rain. December rain here is bitterly cold and dismal, the low clouds creating a darkness which hangs on the land and changes it, to my mind, entirely—all the wild beauty stripped away and replaced by a frighteningly sombre flatness and grayness, a palpable depression. Needless to say, few children attended school. The Johnson boys from Tug, who live so near, the Justices, one or two of the Wade girls, two out of six Rameys, and Jink Cantrell, who had walked all that way in the drizzle primarily because I had promised him that when he had finished his pages of extra sums (he had done so), he should have a little copy of
Tom Sawyer
to keep for his own. He came in wet and grinning, hand already outstretched. Dory's charm can be read in his face, that charm which derives, I suppose, from the father, whose good looks were legendary in his youth, according to Aldous, who has for years been writing a kind of “history” of this region.

Lessons went well. It did seem strange, however, to have so few pupils: early December should be the peak season for school attendance, since the children are not needed for planting or harvesting, and the paralyzing snows which come in January and February have not yet begun. The gusting rain of the two days previous had fallen off to a faint, dull drizzle; inside, by the stove, we were warm and content. At lunchtime, I had planned a surprise for these few hardy souls who had braved such weather to come to school—Ovaltine!

But well before noon, we were interrupted by a rousing knock on the door—Wall Johnson, who had come in his wagon as far as the bend to get his sons and take them home, and who volunteered transportation to all the others as well.

“Creek's a-rising, Richard,” he said. “Iffen you-all don't get out of here, hit's like to wash out the footbridge and then you'll be stuck fer sure, I reckon. You'll have to walk the long way round over Black Rock Mountain.”

The children chirped like excited birds as they gathered their belongings together. Wall Johnson, wearing a wet black hat of a vaguely Western cut and a great dark coat, looked like a man out of a novel as he stood dripping just inside the schoolhouse door, his wet red whiskers clumped together in an almost comical way. “You'd best come on, yourself,” he said. “You can stay with us fer a spell.” But the idea of such close quarters with the unfortunate Mrs. Johnson made me demur.

“I thank you kindly,” I said, and meant it. “But I'm all stocked up here, Wall, and I guess I'll just ride it out.”

He nodded, gathered up the children, and left. As I stood in the door watching them cross the creek I saw that, indeed, it had risen almost unbelievably in the past two hours: it rushed along now at a mere four or five feet beneath the swinging bridge (or “footbridge” as the natives say). I stood there enjoying the sudden contrast of warmth and chill—the momentary excitement of this “flood”—and no sooner did Wall Johnson and the children pass from sight, than she appeared!

She stepped suddenly out of the dark wet woods on the far side of the rising creek, wrapped in a long blue coat and wearing a scarf. Before I could call out—if, indeed, she could have heard my voice over the sound of the rushing water—she was running across the bridge which now seemed to sway dangerously, perilously: my heart leaped into my throat.

For I realized, in that instant, the truth.

I loved her
, and no amount of reason, as supplied by Aldous Rife, or “Mighty Lak a Rose” as supplied by Miss Perkins, or silk stockings and manicured hands which await me in Richmond, or even religious conviction (
what I know to be right
vs.
what I know to be wrong
)—nothing at all can change this. It was as if the six weeks since last we met had never passed, as if all my efforts to forget her had not transpired.

I stepped out into the rain and she ran right into my arms.

She lifted her face to mine, and I kissed her; I could not have done otherwise! Then I drew her inside. She flung off the scarf and pressed herself to me again and I kissed her again. In some part of myself I was amazed, and yet there was that sense of the inexorable, that inevitability which I feel with her always.

“You never come,” she said, making it not an accusation but a statement. “I been waiting but you don't come.”

“I will,” I said. I think I moaned. “Or you can come here.”

The instant I said it, I was appalled, but she looked around the room and then took off her coat, laying it across a desk. “I might ought to do that,” she said. “Hit might be the best if I did. You've cleaned it up,” she said. “It looks all different from when Mr. Parrish was here.” (Mr. Parrish was the teacher who preceded me.)