Oral History (9781101565612)

by Lee Smith

  The porch steps of the old homestead sag and the porch itself is falling in, rotting, with ivy climbing sensuously up through the floorboards. Yet this old place appears in no way haunted as in the stereotyped versions of haunted houses one sees perhaps on late-night TV. The door slid open with a somewhat melodramatic creaking effect when I turned the key in the lock. It did sag inward as if exhausted also. But the parlor inside was empty of theatrical cobwebs or any other stirring items. It resembled nothing so much as a house before someone moves in. Empty—not evil! True, dust was spread like an even lacy carpet on the floor. True, the handmade rocker I had heard about sat forlornly before the blackly yawning fireplace, in the place where I had been told it would be, but it resembled nothing so much as some old dilapidated relic left behind in the hustle and bustle of someone’s Moving Day. It certainly did not look significant. I wandered all through the six-room house. Originally it was but a cabin—you can see where they have paneled over the old logs, where they have added on. The kitchen, of which little remains, must have been primitive !, but it was very difficult for me to visualize my real mother as a little child gaily playing in these rooms, or her cousin Billy (the ghost?) or Al or Lewis Ray and Sally whose acquaintance I have not even made.

  I turned the tape recorder on and left it beside the fireplace, near the rocking chair. I looked back at it from the doorway as I was leaving, at its plastic spools silently spinning in the empty room, where it resembled nothing so much as a conscious anachronism in some kind of folklore film on ETV. As I stood there in the doorway, I received a chill which caused me to pull my sweater around my shoulders. Yet was this a premonition, or the real chilliness that comes in these mountains even in June as the sun dramatically sets, spraying its brilliant hues across the western sky?

  I cannot say.

  Meandering back down the rocky hillside, I come upon a strand of green glass beads shining in the weeds. I pick the beads up, turning them this way and that in my hands, letting the sun play over them, before letting them drop again to earth. They are cheap, half broken. Suddenly they seem to me symbolic of this whole enterprise which strikes me as silly, a fool’s errand, even though my grandfather told me in such detail on the telephone about the rocking chair, the terrible banging noises and rushing winds and ghostly laughter that began every day at sundown, driving them at last from their home. One feels that the true benefits of this trip may derive not from what is recorded or not recorded by the tape now spinning in that empty room above me, but from my new knowledge of my heritage and a new appreciation of these colorful, interesting folk. My roots.

  I think this is why Dr. Bernie Ripman urged me from the beginning to choose this as my oral history project: he wanted me to expand my consciousness, my tolerance, my depth. I wonder how I shall ever be able to repay him for the new frontiers of self-knowledge I have crossed.

  I stray. From where I now sit, with the warmth of this sun-warmed old primeval stone soaking into my body, I feel nothing so much as an outpouring of consciousness with every pore newly alive. I shall descend now, to be with them as they go about their evening chores.

  Jennifer shuts the notebook and picks her way down the hill. But when she reaches her uncle’s house, nobody is doing any chores. Everything from dinner has been put away. Even the smell of fried chicken has disappeared. The big old woman who is her grandmother, Ora Mae, has gone from her easy chair on the porch. Little Luther has fallen asleep with his head cocked over on his shoulder like a bird. TV sirens shrill out the open front door. Little Suzy, dragging a Charlie’s Angel doll by the hair, stands crying in front of the closed van with its ornate custom painting job—maroon palm trees, golden waves, a black death’s head on the back. Every now and then Suzy bangs her dolly on the closed door of the van. Her crying is like a cat mewing, and it s getting dark already down here, and lightning bugs are coming up everywhere out of the grass. You can hear the creek from out of the darkness beyond the yard.

  Then Ora Mae comes out of the house, huge and pastel and shapeless in her housedress, and gets Suzy by the hand because it’s bedtime.

  “Can I help you with anything?” Jennifer asks, standing by a tire full of blooming begonias in the yard. “That dinner was so good—I know you must be tired.”

  Ora Mae stands still in the yard, breathing hard, while Suzy pushes crying against her legs. Ora Mae stares at Jennifer. “I don’t reckon,” she says.

  “Good night, Suzy,” Jennifer says, reaching for the little girl’s hand, but Suzy just cries and pulls away. With a start, Jennifer sees Suzy’s fingernails shining up at her, phosphorescent silver in the dusk. Ora Mae takes Suzy into the house while Jennifer stands in the yard by the tire. “You can set on the porch if you want,” Ora Mae says back to her from the door. Ora Mae thinks Jennifer is a lot like her mother Pearl, even though Jennifer has been raised by strangers. Pearl never knew what to do with herself either. Jennifer even looks like Pearl, pale blond hair and white skin, slight, with too-big blue eyes and the kind of face that asks a question all the time. Jennifer goes and sits on the porch and listens to her grandfather snore, a soft rattling noise. Resembling nothing so much, Jennifer thinks, as the wind blowing through a tree full of autumn’s dead leaves. She sits in an aluminum chair on the porch and writes that down. After a while Ora Mae comes back out to sit in her easy chair. She takes up her yarn again. The boys watch TV and Little Luther sleeps, all dressed up. Up on the mountain, that tape rolls on in the empty house.

  “How can you see to work?” Jennifer asks, trying to start a conversation. It enters her head that her grandmother is not as friendly as someone might have supposed. She doesn’t seem pleased at all to have a new-found granddaughter turn up after so many years.

  “Don’t need to see much,” Ora Mae says, but she has some light anyway from the front-room window behind her. Her fingers, large and twisted, move in the light, but Jennifer can’t see her face.

  “I think it’s just wonderful the way all of you still live right here in this valley and help each other out,” Jennifer says. “It’s remarkable. Not many people live that way anymore.” Extended family situation, she thinks, but it’s too dark to write in the notebook.

  Ora Mae says nothing.

  “I was wondering,” Jennifer says after some time has passed and the boys have switched the channel, “if you could give me a little more precise information. Now, Grandfather told me all about the rocking and the laughter and the wind. And of course I know how my mother came back here when I was little, after she and my father separated, and then she got pneumonia and went to the hospital and died. But it must have been about that time too that my uncle Billy died, wasn’t it, if I’ve got it all straight in my head. Uncle Billy was murdered by a mentally ill teen-ager, isn’t that right? An escapee from a home of some kind? At least that was the information I got from Little Luther—your husband,” Jennifer adds crazily, since her grandmother is giving no sign of even hearing her, just moving the brown and yellow yarn in and out of her fingers. “Grandfather said that Uncle Billy was killed in the rocking chair because that’s where he sat all the time after my mother died and even before. So I was wondering if you could tell me some more about that time, which must have been very difficult for you, coming so soon after the death of my mother. Maybe you can tell me something about what Billy was like as a child, so I could gain some insight into why he sat in the chair for so long.” Jennifer is all out of breath when she finishes, but Ora Mae doesn’t say a word. The silence stretches out. Jennifer squints at her watch: 7:30, only one half hour to go. Ora Mae works the yarn. Jennifer wishes she was back at the college, or back in her father’s house watching Masterpiece Theater with Martha or making popcorn for her little sisters.

  But then Little Luther wakes up with a jerk. “Why hello there, honey!” he almost hollers. “Just catching a catnap myself. That’s all, just a little catnap. Listen now. Listen here. I bet you’ve never heard this one.” Little Luther grabs up his dulcimer and start
s in on the cabbage-head song which, sure enough, Jennifer has never heard, and after a while she is joining in on the chorus. Jennifer has a sweet, pure little voice with no feeling in it at all. Little Luther does “Fox on the Run.” He is a real treasure. The boys turn up the TV louder so they can hear it. Al and Debra’s whole house is loud and happy except for Ora Mae, who sits like a pile of dough in her green easy chair. Then the door of the van opens, to Jennifer’s complete surprise, and here come Al and Debra, who must have been in there working on the carpet all along! Debra runs right up on the porch and starts clogging even in her thong sandals, and Al leans up against the porch post and sings along with his dad. Al has a deep, rich boom-boom kind of a voice, which goes fine with his daddy’s high thin one: they sound great together, in fact.

  “Listen here,” Little Luther says. “I bet you’ve never heard this one.”

  He and Al sing, “Mama, don’t whup little Buford, Mama don’t pound on his head, Mama don’t whup little Buford, I think you should shoot him instead,” and Debra clogs too in front of the bright screen door.

  Jennifer claps her hands when it is over. “You all are just wonderful,” she says.

  “Al ain’t so wonderful,” Little Luther says. “That Al there, he was so ugly when he was a boy, I had to tie a pork chop around his neck to get the dog to play with him.”

  “Why, shoot, Daddy!” Al takes it up, grinning, “there ain’t no truth in you. Why, you’re so ugly yourself that one time when we put your picture out in the field, the crows brought back corn they stole four years ago.”

  Then they start singing “Wildwood Flower” and it is all so fine, it is just like Jennifer hoped it would be, until Ora Mae stands up all of a sudden and ruins it.

  “It’s time,” she says.

  Jennifer stands up too. “Have you all got a flashlight I could borrow?” she asks. “I’ll just run up and get the tape recorder and then I’ve got to go.”

  “She can’t go up there,” Ora Mae says.

  “Well, you can count me out!” Debra says, shaking her curls. “I wouldn’t go up there for a million dollars.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind,” Jennifer says. It’s her honors project, after all.

  “No,” says Ora Mae. She stands up by her chair like an old white rock.

  “OK, Mama, I’ll do it,” Al says, and he gets his flashlight and takes off up the trail, so big and strong that nothing—man or ghost, either one—would want to mess with him. While he’s gone, Little Luther plays and sings some more and Debra goes inside to get the boys to bed. “Come on Mama, just let us see what’s coming on next,” Roscoe wails, but Debra hushes him up and cuts off the TV. Little Luther sings “Wise County Jail,” which Jennifer has never heard before either. She hopes she will be able to remember all these concrete details. She hums along.

  Al comes bursting out of the darkness carrying the tape recorder and hollering at the top of his lungs, something you can’t understand. “Mama!” he says. “Lord God! Mama!” She opens her arms and wraps him up in them, big old man that he is.

  Al lets the tape recorder drop on the steps by Jennifer. She jumps up. “What happened?” she asks. “What happened? Did you see something? Did you hear anything?”

  “Lord God! Lord God!” Al whoops. He has to sit down on the porch steps and light a cigarette. After one drag, though, he takes it out of his mouth and flings it off into the grass. “Lord God!” Al says. He runs his big hand through his hair.

  “Did you hear something?” Jennifer asks.

  Al sits still and looks right at her.

  “Shit,” Al says. “Hear something? Hear something?” he mimics. Al gets up then and goes into the house, yelling for Debra. The screen door slams.

  Little Luther tries to say something, but he’s all wrought up and the words come out crazy, you can’t make out what he means.

  “You hush now,” Ora Mae tells him, and he does, and Ora Mae goes and stands out in the yard. “Storm coming on—” she says this out loud, to nobody. Ora Mae stands completely still, like she’s waiting for something or like she’s listening. Jennifer sits on the steps clutching the tape recorder, watching Ora Mae, who is nothing now but a tall white shape in the night. Tree frogs sing out in the darkness; lightning bugs blink in the darker dark of the shade trees. The sycamore tree looms white. The heat is lifting some now, so a little wind comes up from the creek and ruffles the hem of Ora Mae’s dress. It ruffles the leaves of the shade trees, sighing, rising stronger now up from the creek and blowing across the yard, it’s sighing up the holler toward Hoot Owl Mountain, moaning around the house. It has voices in it, and thunder coming, and Jennifer on the steps and Ora Mae in the yard incline their heads in the wind like they’re listening.

  Part One

  Almarine Cantrell ~ born 1876

  GRANNY YOUNGER

  From his cabin door, Almarine Cantrell owns all the land he sees. He’s not but twenty-two years old now. Young, then—you could call him young for owning this much land and that’s a fact, but they’s other ways Almarine is not young now and never was young atall. He growed up right here, right on this place. Nobody ever knowed what he was up to.

  Where’s Almarine? they allus said, and who told the answer to that? Not his mama, nor his daddy, nor yet those sorry brothers of hisn, nor even me over here where I live on the south side of Hurricane Mountain where I have been a-living praise God for more years than I could tell you if I was to sit down and try to count them which I won’t. I been here a long time. Years. I know what I know. I know moren most folks and that’s a fact, you can ask anybody. I know moren I want to tell you, and moren you want to know. And if I never knowed exactly where Almarine was when he was little, I could of give you a good idea.

  He’d be down on Grassy Creek all by hisself most likely, seeing how the water ran over the rocks and how cold it kept even in summer, or he’d be up in the crook of the biggest sycamore there at the bend afore the trace starts down through the spruce-pines, a-setting up there still as a little old owl for hours and hours just waiting to see if anybody ever come up the trace, which nobody ever did, or he was out back in the dugout where they kept the meat all winter on the cold dirt floor, and potatoes and onions down in the straw in the grabbling holes, but him not a-grabbling neither, just sitting there still as you please and breathing that musky salty smell in there, a dark smell like something too old to figure whatever it mought have been.

  Well, that was Almarine. Almarine fell down between the cracks in the family like some children will.

  In spite of him being so pretty, with all that pale-gold hair, in spite of him being no trouble to a living soul. Almarine was said to spend nights in the laurel slick over by Frenchman’s Cave, nights by hisself out there when he was not but nine or ten. Now that’s the wild side of Black Rock Mountain. And Almarine knowed where Grassy Creek starts, away up high on Hurricane behind this land of mine, away up there where it comes a-bubbling and a-snorting like a regular fountain right out of the ferny ground. Almarine went beyond that spring, too, straight up the rocky clift where the trees won’t grow and this little fine green grass grows all around in a perfect circle. A lot of folks won’t go up there. But Almarine went and lived to tell it and went again, and nobody marked his comings or goings in particular, or cared how he could scream in the night like a painter until the painters all around were screaming back. Almarine trained a crow one time, till it could talk. It could say about fifteen words when his brother Riley kilt it with a rifle, out of spite. That’s how Riley was. But Almarine! Almarine had the lightest, biggest eyes when he was a little child. It seemed like he never blinked. He liked to look out on some distance.

  Almarine didn’t need nobody, is what it was, and there’s folks won’t take to a child like that. Still and all, he was sweet when nobody else in that family was, so this was a part of it too. People don’t like somebody to be so sweet it makes them look bad, that’s a fact. Which he was. I mean he was that sweet. In fact Almarine wa
s that kind of sweet moony child who’ll likely end up without a thing in this or any other world, without a pot to piss in.

  How Almarine ended up with all this land is a curious thing.

  His daddy, Charles Vance Cantrell, was a big old man as mean as a snake and hard on women and children. He had him one gold tooth in the front. Charles Vance Cantrell was Irish or so he said at one time. He had him a long gold chain with a big watch on it that had some dates and “Dublin” carved into the back, but don’t you know he lost it in a poker game at old man Joe Johnson’s store like he lost those mules and everything else he owned sooner or later except his land, and Lord knows it’s surprising how he never lost that too. He never put up his land. Anyway, Charles Vance Cantrell—they called him Van—was a fat old man who gambled a lot and would just as soon strike you as speak. He come by ship, he said, and then by wagon, and they was religion mixed up in it someway, but of course you couldn’t never prove it by Van Cantrell. He brung that wife of hisn, that Nell, from Ireland with him, or so we thought, although wasn’t nobody sure since she was so ashy-pale and she never said a word until Van went off to fight in the war after which she perked up considerable. It would of been all right with me if she had not, now that’s the truth. I never give a fig for that Nell.

  Anyway, Van went off through Indian Grave Gap, over Snowman Mountain and down into West Virginia, where he joined up with the Union. Nobody knowed if he joined with the Union out of principle or because, what I thought, it was the quickest army to get to, and Van Cantrell ever loved a fight. Now some men hereabouts took up on one side, and some the other. They was nary a slave in the county. So they done what they felt to do. It split some families down the middle, I’ll tell you that. Churches too. They is a church in Abingdon that to this day has got one door for those who stood with the Union in the war and one door for Johnny Reb, and this is true, and I’ll swear it. To this day.