The Pritchett Century (19 page)

“Hit’s awful mean stirrin’, stirrin’—” apologized the man.

The range we were to cross against his advice was nearly seven thousand feet high. It was forest-covered from base to summit, and a rocky trail, once used by ox wagons in fetching lumber but now altogether disused, tackled the slope abruptly and looped the contours.

When the trail reached the high gap it fizzled out into a wide “bald,” a bare dome of mountain where the gales had cleared away the trees and cropped the turf almost to the roots. The skeleton gray stumps of cut or uprooted trees stared oddly, vacantly, like forgotten milestones. The earth was windstripped and seemed to be lighted only by the gaze of the fog as it moved over.

It is simple thus in a few lines to indicate hours of struggle, for comparatively low as the range was, it takes large effort to haul oneself up such slopes. The filtering underworld gloom of the forest is something to fight through. After plodding and hard breathing without any apparent gain, we would see through a gap in the trees that already we were head and shoulders out of the lower valley ocean where the choppy hillocks swirled minutely and crumbled into green surf.

Then we would turn and dive again into the submarine forest verdure and feel its fluid air. The spindling gray trunks of millions of trees packed like threads of water into a blurred torrent of distance, poured and splashed down in immense silence about us. We had the sensation of walking in flooded vaults of touchless sap-distilled water.

The earth drew the noise out of our feet as we strode from silence to silence, while the multitudinous forest waited. In cities silence is negative, is the absence of sound. But on that vast shield of mountain forest the silence was positive. One felt its presence, breathed it in tangible, inaudible drafts.

At times we felt there was no air; only this greenish, glassy quiet in which the falling of the crisp body of a leaf hit distinctly, deliberately, with the ring of event.

For hours we pushed, pushed, pushed back the air, pressed back the trees, stamped the earth, toed the rocks, shouldered all our forces to the ascent. After the first ridge I vowed I would never climb a mountain again. But which is worse, to climb a mountain or to be in a valley wanting to climb one?

The thought of Gashry Alison comforted me. It was the constant mention of him among the mountaineers, and the spur which the unknown gives to the imagination, that made this lonely and unknown figure a companion. His pack must have been heavier than mine, what with his clothes, spectacles and peddling staff.

How did he find the ascent? Did this quiet solidify against him? Seize him like deep pervading water? Or did his warm nature melt and release the mountain forces, till leaves fell from the trees like the crash of cymbals, and springs sang out, and partridges rattled up from cover like country people cluttering out of church, and till winds mounted and swelled a manifold diapason through the forest’s mighty register of pipes?

How was it with Alison? Did he sing? Did he muse? Did he tire? Did he rush his hills? Or did he sink back into his own pace and lug his body up glumly, while the forest, always ahead and standing in thin, silver battalions, ordered him up and up, in its inescapable routine?

Perhaps traveling is a mundane thing. All our giants are windmills, all our armies are sheep, if we go forth with the rhetorical expectations of Don Quixote. Gashry Alison must have had something the Spanish gentleman missed.

It takes more than a pair of legs to make a man climb mountains and live on salt bacon and pastry among strangers in order to peddle brooches, clothes and spectacles. I believe all Alison’s windmills must have been giants.

There was always some news of Alison to be got at a mountaineer’s hut. Sitting on the porch while leading the lanky, genial but suspicious “Doc” or “Pete” onto the subject, one would eventually hear something like this:

“Thar hain’t no one the like o’ Gash Alison. He’s the travelin’est
man I ever seed. Seemed like as though he waur always footin’ it over the worl’. ‘Wan will I build me a house an’ settle?’ he says, the last night he waur here. ‘Boys,’ he says, ‘I fit in three wars and seen a sight o’ frays and places, and guess I’ll jes be shacklin’ ’round till I’m as ol’ as you-uns is, grandf’er.’ ”

Before dusk we reached the “bald” and were as high as we ever climbed in our wanderings. Over the gale-cropped dome of the “bald,” the gritty gray clouds passed low like enormous buzzards. Scarves of cloud moved down from the banks, and looking below them as through a half-covered window, we could see the sun-honeycombed forest cast distantly away into the ultimate hollows of the world.

The clouds rolled like a surge over the spruce and balsam, smudging the indigo masses with fog. But westward we could see the tidal summits of an ocean of hills; varying, pellucid ranges over which passed squalls of green, ultramarine and gray. The long fields swept up obliquely to where the summits broke or rolled over, throwing up calls of spray to the inaccessible sky.

This was crisis. Alison must have stood where we were standing, many a time, a wind-dark speck pausing on the dome of the “bald.” Now I should find him, hear all about him. Or this would be the end.

But life and mountains do not have our dramatic sense. I heard of Alison again that night and again the day following, when, like a falling star, his golden course burned suddenly out halfway up in the heavens, unfinished. But this night we slept in a shack in the upper branch. The grandfather, father, mother, daughter and son of the house slept in one room and we in the other. The mountaineers will give anything up for a stranger, do anything for them. In fact, the conversation turned that way as we sat before the fire.

“We-uns niver turns away no one wan they asks for shelter an’ a meal’s victuals. Thar’s always someone comin’ through the gap, peddlers and sich. Gash Alison uster come reg’lar.”

The father broke in with high-up voice:

“Does you-uns know Gash Alison? Waal, he were a furriner and him comin’ over the waters. He ’llows he’s the only Gash in the worl’. He says the day he waur born his mother didn’t know how to call him till one night, like it would be ol’ man Alison had a dream, and a v’ice
said, plumb loud, so hit woke him, ‘Gashry!!’ That’s a right quare name. ‘How d’ye spell it?’ I asks. ‘I couldn’t rightly denote,’ says Gash. ‘Like the v’ice kinda didn’t say nathong more’n that.’ ”

I sat on the porch of the shack of the woman who smiled.

Everyone on the creek was related to everyone else. There had been intensive intermarriage for generations. The wit who said a man might be his own grandmother and not know it, erred more in lack of tact than he erred in exaggeration. The Ayreses, the Ingrams and the Vances brooded in their lofty hollows far from call of man or beast from the plains.

The blue smoke of the caldrons scratched the air, the bare, damp feet of the women and children were marked by the basket patterning of the field grass. These earth-held families raised corn, sliced apples, made honey, shot in the woods, and brought sacks of flour on horseback to their shacks.

The Ayreses, the Ingrams and the Vances brooded and fattened turkeys, and nothing ever happened except a great gale or a spell of drought. The boys tried the settlement school for a while, grew up and felt their legs getting too long for them, took guns and went up into the woods alone to live, till inclement weather or weariness of excitement drove them down to the creek again.

The wind is clever, the rain is sharp, and earth clings to boots and body; and something of the wind, the rain and the clay, something careless, dynamic, stolid, entered the ways of these boys, these Ulstermen, these Scotsmen, these English whom the mountains held.

These boys had never seen the sea, or cities, or Negroes. One of them told me he first saw a Negro when he was eighteen, and that he ran home frightened, shouting, “I’ve seen the boogeyman!” Horace Kephart, in his book on the mountains, tells almost the same tale.

Skies are fair today, but tomorrow gray gullies of water may spurt down, or winds hiss arrowing through the air. So one night Ed Ingram—I naturally never give the real names of these mountaineers—who
was eighteen, ran off with Rose Vance, who was fourteen. It was not exactly an elopement because nearly everyone knew about it.

The couple ran over into Tennessee, where the marriage laws are easier; and the magistrate in one of the creeks married them. The ceremony was brief. Mountain ceremonies always are brief. A tale is current that one magistrate boasted his marriage ceremony to be only four words: “Stand up. Jine. Hitched.” I understand it is longer nowadays.

At news of the elopement the parents were scandalized, having done exactly the same themselves; then resigned; then relieved. As old McCoy Vance said, “Wan a woman takes an idee into her head hit hain’t no good obstructioning. I’ve got twelve daughters and seven sons, an’ I know summat about it.”

Ed Ingram worked a bit, loafed a bit and went for days and days on end shooting in the woods. He could never resist the cool, lengthy woods, free and clear to him as spring water. He didn’t harm anyone. He didn’t interfere with anyone. The mountains are wide as the wind. Why should anyone want to interfere with him? Isn’t there room enough and to spare for all in the mountains?

It is good enough to enjoy one’s own happiness. It is bad enough to suffer one’s own wretchedness. What business is it all of strangers, of educators, officers, of the monotonous, organized people of the plains, where the water is so poor and warm with lying in lead pipes that the townspeople have to put ice in it! Fancy putting ice in water!

Rose Ingram may have five, ten, fifteen children by now. Besides there are turkeys to fatten, fruit to preserve, food to cook, and that man to wait on hand and foot; and water to carry from the springs, and clothes to mend, taxes to pay, and apples to sell.

Once in a while she washes clothes, not often, though; and complains of the clouds of flies that fill her bedroom-cum-kitchen-cum-parlor. If she and Ed were to read this they would probably resent the implication of poverty, for a mountaineer will admit himself to be everything except poor.

“Wan has you-uns ever lacked a meal’s victuals or a bed in the mountains?” I can hear them asking. But it is not that kind of poverty. If hospitality is riches, then the mountaineers are the richest people in the world. I remember the rebuke I received from a man whom I had offered to pay for a service:

“Pore folks haster work. But we don’t hafter work. We hain’t pore.”

All this I thought while sitting on the porch of the hut of the woman who smiled. Gray parallelograms of rain shadowed the creek, and soaking scarves of white cloud surf flew from the wet blue and madder mountains. The water haze was over the creek, a web of flat vapor. The sky was hoofed and rutted with botched cloud traveling and thrown up in heavy clods.

Runnels of bright clay water were richly pouring with the note of clear cattle bells, and a stocky rain tapped like drumsticks on the roof of the hut. Escaping from the collapse of rain, we rushed to the porch of the woman’s house. It was little more than a shed propped up high on four piles of rock.

A semicircle of beehives made of pipes and tin cans with rocks for lids stood in the clearing before the house. A lambskin was stretched over the wall to dry.

The woman was sitting on the floor in the doorway of the hut. She was scantily clothed in a coarse dress, and her legs and feet were bare. Her straw-colored hair was drawn from her forehead and fell in limp tails down her back. Ten ragged and contented children were crawling over her as she nursed a young baby, and sat curled on the floor like a gentle animal, uncomplainingly.

She was as pale as water, pale as sap, pale as a cane of rye, and her faint, narrow eyes shone with an idling light. She looked at us dreamily; and her lips, weirdly thin and colorless (from wind and rain and not from poverty, we felt), construed a little changeless smile. It was always there. She seemed to look at us and smile at us through water from another world. It was the smile of Mona Lisa.

Questions dawdled from between her lifted lips:

“Whar does you-uns come from? What did you-uns say you-uns was called? Is you-all man and wife? Uh, huh. How old are ye? An’ you-uns comes over the waters? That’d be a scandalous long ways, yander, I reckon. Would you-all like some apples? If you-uns wants any, jes get ye them. Thar’s more apples this y’ar nor any y’ar I ever seed.”

This reads absurdly, for every sentence loafed between linked pauses in that drooping intonation which is of the soil. She said she had been married when she was fifteen and was now twenty-nine. She said she had eight children, and had three sisters younger than her
own eldest daughter. She herself had been one of a family of twenty-one.

She smiled continuously her faint pearl smile.

“Las’ night the moon was travelin’ north,” she said. “Hit’ll rain a right smart piece more and get cold. I mind the time wan our spring friz plumb up on the first of September.”

I laughed at this and she looked at the feathering rain. And her lips lifted and her constant smiles moved lightly like a single ripple of water.

A break in the thicket showed two men coming to the house. Lanky figures with hands in pockets, and a gun apiece laid horizontally between their arms behind their backs. They stopped when they saw us, then jumped onto the porch and smiled a doubtful “Howdy” and scanned the dimly greeting lips of the woman for information about us.

They went inside the house and studied us from behind the curtains, evidently very suspicious. “I know whar ye’ve bin, daddy,” cried out one of the children, but the father came out genially and clapped his hand over the child’s mouth. He introduced himself: “I’m Tom McKinney, yours truly. I didn’t catch yourn?”

He went inside and fell to whispering with his companion. A lot of mysterious operations went on inside the room. We noticed signaling with fingers, chins and lips. Turning sharply, I caught the woman scrutinizing us closely with awakened clear eyes, but when she saw me turn they fell back subtly to the underwater idling gaze.