by Lee Smith
The landscape was changing now before my eyes, flatland to mountains, and I found myself enthralled by the passing view. The Valley of Virginia, as it is called, is unbelievably, breathtakingly beautiful. The mountains rise like improbable monoliths to brood over the broad sweeping valleys, producing a landscape of such texture and hue that merely to see it is to thank God. Such beauty cannot but proceed, one feels, from the Divine. Darkness fell. I dined upon roast pork and candied apples. Easily making my way back to the seat, I remarked upon how I had accustomed myself to the bucking, rolling motion of the train. The lights were dimmed; the man brought around some pillows. Sleeping thus was profoundly uncomfortable and I wished I had acceded to my mother’s desire to purchase a sleeping-coach ticket, yet it had seemed a foolish extravagance, inasmuch as we should reach my stop before morning. I instructed the man to wake me, turned my face to the window, that impenetrable rolling darkness, and slept. Roanoke: a lengthy stop. Christiansburg. I never fully woke, nor fully slept.
I awakened in the dead of night, understanding immediately what this oft-encountered phrase actually meant: the dead of night! My heartbeat seemed loud and irregular. Our engine was straining as we proceeded slowly on an upward grade. The mountains! at last. Something akin to panic clutched at my throat. As we attained the summit, I pressed my forehead to the cool glass. Pale moonlight fell on a stretch of landscape which reminded me of the storm-whipped surface of the sea: the mountaintops were whitened by moonlight like the crests of waves. I had never seen a view so cold, or strange, or beautiful. I felt a sense of awe and wonder, and then of foreboding as we plunged down through a stand of trees and the light was gone, that lovely land torn as if by magic from my sight.
“Here. Get ye a chicken leg.”
The voice was old and soft, with a true sweetness; nevertheless, I confess I jumped in fright as she spoke.
I turned from the window to view my companion—old priestess of the realm of Lethe, as I had dubbed her in my mind. Amazingly, she had spread a huge repast upon her seat, and ate hungrily. “Here’s ye a chicken leg,” she said.
I was too startled to answer. The interior light was so dim that I doubted my eyes; it was as if this whole encounter were taking place in a badly-made moving picture. It must have been four o’clock in the morning. Everyone else in the coach slept on. And yet this was the time which the strange old woman had chosen for her repast. And I had eaten two large meals within the past twelve hours. “No, thank you,” I started to say, but I found to my amazement that I was suddenly ravenous.
“You are very kind,” I found myself saying instead. I accepted the proffered chicken leg and a good deal of other food besides. Of course, this was a most peculiar response on my part: while never finicky, I am nonetheless a regular and somewhat disciplined partaker of both food and drink. Yet I joined the old woman in her unorthodox spread without the slightest hesitation. She was going back home, she told me. She had been to stay with her sister in Richmond, who was sick. She would not say much more than that. Ours was a brief and difficult conversation, in fact; she volunteered nothing. The track was rougher now, the coach swayed, and cinders flew out in the night. I ate chicken, pound cake, deviled eggs, dried peaches. “That’s right,” she crooned, “you’ll need it. A young man like you, traveling. You’ll need it,” she said. A chill went through me at her words, but I shook it off directly. I have always been too prone to the workings of the imagination, a tendency I am well aware of. We finished our strange repast in silence as gray light grew in the windows of our car. My man came to wake me. He looked surprised and somehow disapproving when he found me thus engaged; he withdrew quickly.
The bell clanged once. “Mar-i-on!” the conductor shouted. The train ground to a jolting halt. I gathered my belongings furiously, jumped into the aisle so burdened, and turned to thank my companion again. But it was as if our breakfast party had never occurred. All the papers and bones and scraps had been swept into some bag or other, apparently, and she had folded her hands again and closed her eyes. Had I dreamed the whole thing, in my overwrought state—had she ever spread that huge meal out upon the seat and bade me join? She slept.
The conductor deposited me rudely upon the platform at Marion, Va. Some bags of mail and some parcels were exchanged in the cold gray light of dawn; a man laughed, a cock crowed, a dog barked furiously. Then, with a huge gushing rattle, the train, like some lumbering medieval monster, moved on. Marion, Va. It was colder here. I put on my coat and entered the tiny station, where a lone bald-headed man in shirtsleeves sat behind the ticket-counter. Several people, inert folded forms, slept on the long hard benches. It was an old marble floor, tobacco-stained. My footsteps echoed hollowly when I walked.
The ticket-taker looked up over his wire-rimmed spectacles, observing my approach. “Now where are you bound for, sir?” he asked. “Can I send you to Price’s Hotel?”
“No,” I said. “No thank you. I’m going on to Black Rock,” I told him, “and I understand I must make connections here for a smaller-gauge lumber train.”
His eyebrows shot up several inches. “Black Rock!” he exclaimed in a dubious voice which sent my heart plummeting down to my feet. “You don’t say!” he squinted at me.
“I’m going to teach school,” I said.
“Are you now?” The fellow grinned odiously; I thought perhaps he was dim-witted, yet his evident responsibilities appeared to settle the question. “Ralph!” he yelled suddenly; I confess I jumped! Ralph, a grizzled, portly old fellow, appeared in due course, and a lengthy conversation ensued. I could ride the lumber train part way, it developed. I could ride the lumber train to a town named Claypool Hill, which was probably the best thing to do, and then I should have to hire an automobile and a driver, or—more reliable, because of the roads—catch a ride on a mule wagon across the mountains to Black Rock. In any case it would be nearly dark again before I attained my destination. The man named Ralph was chewing tobacco. He spat on the floor as we spoke, several times, dark “splats” which resembled stars. It grew light, people awakened, the doors to the station opened and closed; at length I went up to Price’s Hotel for some coffee, leaving my baggage with Ralph. Now Ralph was not the sort of person with whom one would normally entrust one’s belongings, any more than the old woman on the train was the sort of woman I am accustomed to dine with. But I confess that I never thought twice—at the time—in either case. (Perhaps my education has already begun?)
At length I boarded the narrow-gauge line, which originated at our station.
It stopped at every crossroads, it seemed, and every store; the two passenger coaches were soon packed beyond capacity with mountaineers carrying everything from babies to live flapping chickens. Their stench rapidly became overpowering, yet I was so fascinated by their physiognomy that the long day’s journey passed swiftly. The men were tall, lanky, with not a spare ounce among them. Most were all dressed up for the occasion of traveling in their best dark suits, which gave them the appearance of a convention of pastors; a few, poorer men, I imagine, wore faded clean overalls. They spoke little, mostly to each other and rarely to the wives who accompanied them—if, in fact, they deign to call these women wives! The women were a sad, downtrodden species, from what I could tell. They appeared to be quite subservient to the men, speaking only when spoken to. Some of the girls were remarkably pretty, and yet it was apparent that they age quickly here—the men appearing, by and large, much less the worse for wear. These solemn mountaineers were interspersed with an occasional flashily dressed salesman, or “drummer” as they’re called here, hauling his shoddy case of samples into the hills.
And the hills themselves: I have never seen such impenetrable terrain. The mountains here are not grand and rolling, as they are around Lynchburg and Roanoke. They are steep, straight up and down, with rocky cliffs and vertical gorges. It astounds me that anyone ever thought to settle here in the first place! Viewing this virtually inaccessible land from the jolting train, I was struck forc
ibly with a thought: seeing this, who would choose to live here? And yet there is an inescapable appeal, I find, in the very strangeness, the very inaccessibility. As our little train jolted ever farther into the rough terrain, I realized that, unwittingly, I had probably picked the most remote area still left in these United States; certainly I could not have felt more a stranger had I just entered India. My few attempts at conversation were promptly repulsed, and I sat in silence until the squeal of metal on metal and a violent bumping and grinding stop nearly threw me into the floor. “What’s happening?” I asked wildly. When no one answered, I made my way through the dirty children to the platform between cars and looked out.
A tiny old man stood in the mud by the side of the track, head flung back, mouth open. An extravagantly dressed younger man, wielding some sort of pincers, had him in a kind of stranglehold with the pincers, and indeed, his whole hand, thrust inside the old man’s gaping mouth. Several of the trainsmen stood about the pair, commenting and laughing.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “What’s going on?”
“This old man here flagged us down,” one of the trainmen said. “Says he knowed we’d got Doc Winter on this train. Says he has got a toothache what’s killing him, and Doc Winter has got to pull the tooth. Says if he don’t do hit, he’ll up and throw hisself beneath the train. You think he would’ve, Rip?”
“Sure! He’d do it in a minute,” said the man who was obviously Rip.
“Aha! You rascal!” Doc Winter shouted, holding aloft the infamous tooth.
I turned away.
The “doctor”—who resembled no doctor I have ever seen, neither in dress nor manner nor mien—regained the train, the little old man left, grinning his wide, bloody, gap-toothed grin, and we shuddered into motion again. I considered trying to find the “doctor” in the next car in order to speak with him, yet riding conditions in our car had become such that I could not bear to press myself through the throng.
“Clay-pool Hill!” The cry finally came.
I disembarked to find myself in the middle of Main Street. It was a town resembling a stage set for a motion picture: plank sidewalks, badly paved road, horses and mule teams tied up along the way, although some automobiles were parked, too, in front of the buildings. As I stood blinking in the harsh mid-morning light, trying to breathe despite the dust raised by the passing vehicles, a man stepped out from the crowd and approached me.
“Mr. Burlage?” he asked.
“Yes?” I turned to look at him. He was well over six feet tall, with a bushy red beard and a wide, free smile. He stuck out his hand.
“I’m Wall Johnson,” he said, “over here trading, and they said I was to look for you and bring you on back with me if you was to come on this train. Mr. Perkins said I was to git you if you was to come.” I nodded, amazed by his diction, which I attempt to record faithfully here. Mr. Perkins is the local superintendent of schools, with whom I had corresponded.
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.