The Hills of Home

by Jory Sherman

  Here is where the diary is composed. A record. A remembrance. A simple gift for those who will follow after us.

  I want to remember everything about these Ozarks hills.

  And yet, I grow old.

  But I will remember, as long as these words last. As long as someone reads them, even after I am gone.

  Did I tell you about the sky?

  It's burning out there, red as a maple leaf in fall.

  It will burn forever, like a glowing furnace tended by a god.

  When I walk through this long house to my bedroom, in the dark, the sunset will light my way, embers on the hilltops, flickers of fire over the lakes and hills.

  There will be a soft bed and sleep. There will be dreams.

  There will be memories, glowing in the darkness; persistent unto oblivion.

  Once Upon a Farm

  THERE WAS once a fine farm on a road, with a hill behind it, and a field in front of it that sloped gentle toward a lazy creek full of fish and crawdads. Near the creek were beaver and mink, water spiders and the chipped flint arrowheads left behind by summering Indians who lived off the land and left almost nothing behind to memorialize their existence.

  The farm was built long after the Indians had been driven off the land, crushed out of existence, absorbed into the blood of a people crazed on the concept of "Manifest Destiny."

  The farm was modest, small in acreage, but tucked back away from the main roads so that the man who built it, worked it, could live peaceable and Christian, according to his heart.

  The farmer's name was Jethro Gibson and he had come to the Ozarks from the hills of Tennessee. He lived there on his farm for many years, grew a family, saw his children move away, far away to California, saw his wife's health deteriorate, his garden shrink, his fields go fallow and weed over. Everyone thought Mrs. Gibson would die first. But, that was not to be.

  I think old Jethro collapsed in the shed next to his garage. Died of a heart attack. A neighbor, Elwyn Newshire, found Mr. Gibson there, tried to help him. Elwyn, a polio victim, didn't have full use of his arms and legs, and although he tried to help, Mr. Gibson didn't survive.

  There were two little houses on the place, besides the garage and shed. One of the Newshire women lived in one house for a while, taking care of Mrs. Gibson. Then, a few months after her husband died, Mrs. Gibson passed on.

  The Gibson place is out of the way. It's about twenty-five or thirty miles to the nearest large town. There is a little country store out this way, about three or four miles distant. You can get a lot of things at that little store and the prices are about the same as you would pay in the Berryville, Green Forest or Harrison markets. I don't know how he does it.

  Anyway, there's no one there at the Gibson place anymore. In fact, Elwyn and his mother, Edna, don't live next door either. She has passed on and Elwyn has moved to a small town.

  The Gibson place has never been for sale. I asked why and somebody told me the family just kept it for sentimental reasons. There are two old cars there, rusting away. One is a Ford, the other a Mercury. They were intact when we moved in here, about a mile from there. Since then, the cars have been stripped, gutted, the windshields blasted away by shotguns. The clear glass is now opaque, a complex of shattered crystals more intricate than a spider's web.

  The gravelly country road, tire-lethal with flint chips, runs right through the abandoned farm. The branch runs below the garage and shed, into Osage Creek. On the other side of the road are two small houses. Side by side. Their windows stare broken and vacant onto the road. The mailbox is a nesting place for rats. So is the shed and garage. The houses are nesting places for everything: wasps, snakes, rabbits, owls, mice and immortal cockroaches.

  There are things in the houses. I've seen some of them. But, going into the old houses is sad. There are pieces of clothing that belonged to the children, or to the parents who died after the children left home. There are the cupboards with a few items of food still left on the shelves, the labels faded, the cans swollen from poisonous gases, the ragged cardboard remnants of boxes almost fossilized after being chewed up and used for nests or privys by small animals. Heaped up rodent droppings make a miniature landscape atop the rotted linoleum.

  The things in the house are: a cook stove, some beds, calendars and newspapers, broken cups, a religious scene hung in a frame on the wall, some pieces of toys, parts of a wood heating stove, rags, a few dirty drinking glasses on the warped drainboard next to the stained sink. There are some susurrous shadows in the rooms that don't belong to anyone anymore. They were just left there like worn out long johns to keep company with the dust and move around with the sunlight that manages to get through the dirt-caked windows. There are, too, some old sad echoes that are so faint you have to strain to hear them: "Pa, supper's on the table. Give me the doll. Here comes the mailman. Would you fetch the milk? Goodbye, Mama. They's a copperhead under the porch. Looks like rain."

  There are a couple of apple trees in the front yard. We went there, my wife and I, one day to gather the apples. We had been watching the trees for a long time, waiting for the fruit to ripen. There was no reason to let those apples go to waste. When they started to fall from the trees, we went down the road to the Gibson place the following day to pick the apples. It was time. In fact, it was just past time.

  When we drove up, the trees were full of blackbirds and crows. They perched on the branches in drunken stupors, gorged on ripe apples.

  Every apple on the trees was gone. Eaten up by the birds. Of course, there's no telling how long those birds had been coming to the Gibson place to eat the ripe apples. Or overripe apples. Some of the apples must have fermented, turned their juices to a kind of simple wine.

  Behind the place, up a steep hill, on a level, there were berry bushes, thick, tangly. And, near the creek there was another field full of blackberries. One summer we watched these ripen. We walked there every day to be sure the birds didn't beat us to the harvest. The vines were sagging with luscious ripe blackberries. The vines were so thick you would have had to chop a path through them with a machete.

  The day came when we got our tin buckets and walked down the road to the Gibson place to pick blackberries. It was a glorious morning. We came to the field and stood there in shock. There wasn't a berry bush in sight. Someone, we never found out who, had come by and brushhogged the whole field. I guess they must have chopped them down and loaded them up in a truck. We asked around and none of our neighbors knew anything about it. What was once a field full of berry bushes was only an empty chopped field. We looked up at the two houses and behind them. The brushhoggers had been there, too. The ground was as clean as a hen's egg.

  We scrambled up the hill to the level behind the empty houses. Berries were hard to find, but we found some. Our buckets weren't full, but we had enough to show for our efforts. There weren't enough for a pie, but enough for a sprinkling on our cereal the next morning.

  There just isn't anything to pick there anymore. Between the birds and the brushhoggers, there just isn't any use trying to get something for free. The wild winged creatures know the right day to come. We're always a day late.

  I used to hunt quail back of the Gibson place. And rabbits. One young man I know sometimes sits up in a tree and watches for the deer to cross the upper field.

  We saw a wild turkey hen there one day. She was beautiful, very regal. Now, though, I don't even see any game there on autumn afternoons. Once my dog got stuck under the garage and it took me almost an hour to free him. He had been hunting with me and he disappeared. I was walking down the road when I heard his pitiful cries. It took me ten minutes to find out where he was. He had gone inside the garage and fallen through some rotted boards. I had to take out part of a sideboard to pull him out of his trap. He won't go near the place now.

  There are a lot of abandoned farms down this way. I think they call them hard-scrabble farms. People die. They move away. They never come back. Everything just falls apart. Nobody s
eems to want these farms. Maybe they're jinxed, like the Gibson place seems to be. I don't know. I still go over there once in a while. I stand out there on the road by the mailbox that's a nest for rats and look at the houses, the workshed, the garage, the two old cars.

  It's very peaceful there and I can imagine how it must have been once. If I close my eyes for a moment, I can hear the people laughing and talking. I can hear Bob White piping on the hill, see the deer nibbling the apples. I can hear someone calling me to supper and I can smell the aroma of blackberry pie cooling, sweet and sassy, on the summer window sill.

  A Bit of Shadow, a Sum of Light

  LISA WALKED on the night. Walked on the night itself, like a prowling cat padding across dark lawns, invisible in the tall grasses of empty fields. Where there was hush and silence, soft lights of stars and endless distances stretching quietly, Lisa gazed from her porch and was young, but wiser than those who stayed indoors, who sat and chatted, shuffled cards or accustomed themselves and their minds to images flickering like colored shadows on boxed-in screens.

  Twelve, and not so very twelve, but twelve and almost thirteen, but misty-eyed with thoughts of twenty and such, Lisa danced among the splendid ballrooms of the daft and the dear, saw herself beautiful inside a thousand shrouded mirrors, lost herself in velvet, diamond-studded heavens beyond the shadowed tree-tops of the woods around her Ozarks home.

  Lisa, beloved of stars, then, and silent things: the trees and echoes of chattering insects, the high flights of wildfowl haunting the dusk, searching after quiet fields of August-tall corn and the late finger shadows slipping into the gloves of evening, the light wind whispering about the prairie flowers left behind by the ghosts of her ancestors, and the migrant skulks of quail searching out the quiet safety of their nightbeds. Was like those things, her hair flaxen as the sun touching the tops of shorn wheat, her eyes azure as the hovering chapel of afternoon sky over the hollow's rising ridge beyond the summer garden, her skin as pink as the dawn quivering at the edge of a delicate and morning cloud, Lisa was herself, as serene and contemplative as the fading sunset, as pretty and promising as the budding bloom of day spilling gold into the creek behind the house at the end of a county road.

  But so unhappy inside was Lisa now that her world had changed. A month had passed; promises had been broken, broken at the end of a girl's special summer, the kind that only comes once in a lifetime. Leaving school in May, a mere twelve-year-old, returning in August, practically a teenager; well, it was supposed to be a very special time, a time of changing, of growing, of being happy as the meadowlark singing in the goldenrods, flitting over the greening hayfields, perching on the weathered fence post by the old wooden gate.

  All in clouds, the days kept winging, winging away, and July stunned the Ozarks with heat and husky winds that blew from the southwest, brought the summer storms that made the flowers grow. Lisa loved the storms, for they lit the night she walked upon, made her skin tingle in the rain, made her sleep soft and sweet as they pattered on the asphalt roof above her second-story bedroom.

  Deep in books by day, sitting under a water oak tree or a sturdy hickory beyond sight of the house, Lisa was content in those other worlds, too.

  "She's one of the special ones," the people said of her when they were being kind.

  Others, not so kind, called her "dummy."

  But, Lisa knew who she was and she did not care what people said of her. Because she read books, she knew how people were supposed to be and she knew that she was different, somehow.

  "Why is she so quiet?" people asked her mother. "She doesn't talk much."

  Her mother would say: "She doesn't have to talk. She knows what you're thinking and Lisa is a kind person."

  Lisa told her mother once that she could hear other people's thoughts. But, then she explained that she could not actually hear what people were thinking. "I listen to the spirit in each person. That is what I hear."

  And, one day, when she was reading in her room, her mother walked in. Lisa looked up from her book. "You have to water the plant at your office," she said. "It's dying."

  "How do you know that?"

  "I heard it calling to me."

  When her mother went to the office, she saw the dying plant and gave it water. The plant perked up and its dark shriveled leaves began to smooth out and turn green on that same day.

  Another child asked Lisa why she read so many books. "So I can find out about things I cannot see or touch," she said.

  Lisa lives among flowers and trees, hears the singing and the music no one else can hear. When she looks at stars deep in the night sky, she hears that music, too, and knows, as few souls do, that she is part of all that is and she tells her mother that one day she will write a book about all the secret things she knows and then everyone will know how beautiful life really is, how truly beautiful is the world around them. Her mother said that Lisa told her once: "When I grow up I'm going to write about the colors of shadows on the snow; the silver heartbeats of stars; the shining orange glow of the harvest moon; the sibilant whispers of ocean waves in a seashell; the soft songs the wind sings when it rustles the leaves and grasses; the melodies of sunken stones when the creek is running in spring; the paintings a sunset daubs so delicately on the western sky; and the pastel harmony of a sunrise as it splashes color on the still mirror of a lake rising from the slumber of night into the dawn."

  Some say they have seen the deer and the squirrels come up to her when she is out in the meadow, wading through flowers and grasses. And they say they have seen the way the animals look at her and the way she looks at them. Others have seen the crows fly down to strut back and forth by her feet, chuckling to themselves, until they have made her laugh, when they fly away, calling to all others who will hear.

  There are many mysteries in these Ozarks hills, many stories that the old-timers tell in whispers. Lisa is a ballet dancer among those who walk the land, a creature close to the spirit of all that is living, a part of every thing ever created in the universe. She is not unique, or strange, she just is as she should be; she just is, like everything else that is.

  In another time, in another place, Lisa would have been called "teched", or "gifted," perhaps. In these modern times, she might be labeled "autistic", or "retarded," and, over the course of evolution, she might have been considered a mystic or a witch. She should not be labeled, nor defined by any of these terms. Lisa is, like all of us, a creature of evolution, and her evolvement is merely a leaf on another branch of the mysterious tree of life.

  Yes, Lisa walks on the night and, during the day, is the graceful ballerina on the miraculous and marvelous stage of life.

  Whenever anyone questions the existence of spirit in the universe, you can tell them about Lisa, who grows through reading and will one day write her own book filled with wonders and enchantments beyond imagining in this small finite world, a mystic world painted with a bit of shadow and a sum of light, some of us live in for so brief a while.

  Cedar Creek Woodsongs

  THERE WAS a time when I had a cabin down in Cedar Creek, Missouri, a place where I went to write books, fish, and think about life. It was not far from our home in Forsyth, but it was another world, a place for solitude and reflection, with Bull Shoals Lake at the end of the dirt road that once led to Protem, an old cemetery where slaves were buried, some abandoned houses left behind when the dam was built in the thirties, farms gone to weed and high grass, places still full of memories should anyone care to look and listen.

  I knew Cedar Creek was a special place and did not want to lose it even should I leave it. So, I often went off by myself and wrote down what I saw and felt. Over the years, there have been changes all over these Ozarks hills, and Cedar Creek is no different. Small changes, most of them, but changes that mark the heart. People I once knew have died or moved away; others have taken their places without knowing their predecessors.

  But, the places of quiet and mystery still remain in Cedar Creek, in a lot o
f places in the Ozarks. Deep hollows, grand, sweeping ridges that run down to the lake from working farms, little glens and meadows, hidden springs, small, seasonal creeks that meander through ancient hills and flow into a lake that was once a mighty river, the White, and disappear in the high heat of summer.

  One such day, when I was staying there in Cedar Creek, I took to the woods when the words wouldn't come and cabin fever was upon me like a dark shroud. I wrote down my impressions of that morning when I returned, lighthearted and full of wonder and peace, the shroud lifted from my shoulders, my eyes clear as any Ozarks blue sky morning when the fish are biting and the deer bedded down in secret shade. This is what I did and saw on that long ago day down in Cedar Creek.

  It's as if I were doing it all again at this very moment. I am not living in the past. I am here, and all of it is happening at this very moment. See?

  Just before dawn I go into the woods. It is dark and peaceful, like an empty church. My senses are alert, but not yet attuned to the apparent silence. My boots are noisy and the shapes of trees and brush are not yet defined. There are only large black swatches against the backdrop of night shadows. The world here is strange, at first, bleak and empty, alien. I am an intruder.

  I find a place to sit, a place where I can be unobtrusive yet have a wide field of vision when the morning sun fills the woods with light. The best places to sit are usually downed trees, old stumps, a sloping bank under a high ridge, or a large, flat rock. Places where my human body will not be outlined in silhouette.

  Here, in the hardwoods, well away from roads and houses, is the chosen spot, where the trees are buffers that soak up the sounds I left behind. Below this downed oak, several yards away, is a deer trail, and in the open glade, a place where squirrels can scamper, where the turkeys cross sometimes.