Oral History (9781101565612)

by Lee Smith

With trembling fingers I pretended to examine the earring, and then suddenly I found myself pressing her against me urgently, covering her neck, her hair, her cheek with kisses. I couldn’t stop myself!

  “Dory,” I said hoarsely.

  She turned her face to me then and I kissed her full red lips. I stroked her amazing hair, which sprang up under my fingers like something alive. She broke away then, and looked all around—but there was nobody!—and shivered slightly. Then, as if somehow reassured, she came back into my arms and pressed herself against me; I could feel the softness of her breasts. Sensing that I was about to lose my self-control, I clasped her hands together firmly and kissed them, then stepped back.

  “I’ll go then,” I said. “I shall hope to see you again.”

  Something—perhaps the very phrasing of this sentence—caused her to break into giggles, and still giggling, she turned from me and ran back up the trail until her flying hair was lost in the golden woods.

  I cannot now recall the long tramp home.

  In desperate need of a confidant I settled (perhaps foolishly!) upon Aldous Rife, old misanthrope though he is, and told him of my infatuation with Dory Cantrell and the strange welcome I received upon the occasion of my visit to her home. Aldous Rife listened to my recital with raised eyebrows, running his hand occasionally through his wild white hair. As I continued my recital he began to mumble, shaking his head back and forth, staring down into his glass.

  “Sit down, boy,” he said at length, and once I had seated myself upon the black horsehair sofa before his fire, he began to talk in his rumbling, sonorous voice, apprising me of the following (chilling!) facts:

  Ora Mae’s strange crying out—those three shrieks—are the universal indicator for “foreigners” in these mountains, a known sign meant to convey to moonshiners (“blockaders,” they are termed here) that a stranger is on the way. For I might have been a revenuer, searching out liquor stills. I listened to old Aldous in complete astonishment, his interpretation of the girl’s behavior having never even occurred to me. This, then, is why Dory said she would have “done it” too, if I had surprised her instead of Ora Mae! This is why Mr. Cantrell himself emerged from the woods on horseback, to assure himself of my purpose and to validate my identity. For Almarine Cantrell and his “boys,” according to Aldous Rife, manufacture a great deal of corn liquor, in partnership with a man named Paris Blankenship.

  I drew in my breath with horror and dismay. “A criminal, then,” I said immediately. “A common criminal, and to involve his own family in these activities . . .”

  Old Aldous poked up the fire. “I wouldn’t be so fast to judge, young fellow, if I was you,” he surprised me by saying. “Now you’ve been up that holler, and you’ve seen how many folks Almarine Cantrell has got to feed.”

  “That’s so,” I said.

  “And you seen the land up there, and the hardships, and the way they have to live.” (Aldous has been among these people so long that when he becomes agitated he reflects their manner of speech.)

  “That’s so,” I said once again.

  “Well, you can just figger for yourself how much a man can earn by selling his corn at the mill, versus how much that same man can earn if he takes that selfsame corn and lets it sprout a while, and then grinds it up in a mash and pours him in a little boiling water and lets it stand. . . .” Aldous broke off, observing me shrewdly. “Do you see what I’m getting at?” he asked. “It’s a hard life up there.”

  “Yessir,” I said. I was struck by the truth in his words. I mentioned that Prohibition, too, must have greatly increased the demand for the product.

  “Increased both the demand and the danger,” he said. “It’s a desperate life. There’s the revenuers, and then there’s the competition and bickering among blockaders. And I’ll tell you something else. No man engages in such a business unless he is a desperate man. Almarine Cantrell is a man who would just as soon kill you as look at you, son, I can tell you that for a fact. Since the death of his first wife, Pricey Jane—who was Dory’s mother—since her death, he has become one of the hardest and meanest individuals in the entire region. A man’s nature is dual, you know”—Aldous stared into the fire—“part angel and part devil, with the body as the battleground . . . part evil, part good.... We are created this way, and we engage ourselves in the struggle until we die. But when a man who has been a good man becomes embittered by fate and turns to evil, that good man, I tell you, is worse, is more dangerous to society, than the man who has been committed to ill and followed that path without deviation all along. This convert, though: he will turn guilt to cruelty and act with no compunction, I tell you, with a total lack of compassion, I tell you—” Aldous turned to me. For an instant I had a sense of the preacher he could have been if he’d tried, or if he’d cared to, and the irony of this entire situation came to me with the force of a thunderbolt: how one ruined man can offer an accurate insight into another.

  “You must forget her,” he said then, the note of true finality clearly present in his fine old voice. “You have no choice. She is not suitable. She is not your equal. You are a sojourner here, and the least you will do is to create longings in that girl which her life can never fill. That is the least you can do. The worst you can do is far graver. As your uncle’s friend, I counsel you most solemnly, Richard, to have nothing further to do with this girl. Her father is a dangerous man, a criminal, as you say, and he dotes on her. You must break this attachment, Richard, and break it at once.”

  I was quite shaken by the vehemence of this reaction. When I stood to go, old Aldous stood up too, and grasped my hands. “Let us pray,” he said, and I was further shaken to see this side of him emerge. Standing then on the worn blue rug before his little fire, I bowed my head.

  “Almighty Father,” he prayed, “please give this young man the strength to do Thy will, Lord, to forgo the temptations of the flesh and to cleave to the purity of Thy spirit, Lord, though he be shaken round by doubts, Lord, in Thy Holy Name we pray. A-men.”

  “Amen,” I repeated, very uncomfortable. He released my hands. He picked up his glass, offered it to me, and I without considering the strangeness of this action, took it and drank. I blinked and bit my tongue; the glass proved to contain what I judged to be a fiery brandy.

  “That’s Cantrell liquor,” he said.

  Tears came to my eyes, whether from the burning liquor I had swallowed, or from the knowledge that I must renounce her, or from the pathetic irony of this drunken old man of God who rails against a species of that which has brought him low.

  Directly I took my leave.

  I looked back once, on my way up the sidewalk to the Smith Hotel, to find him still there at the door, looking after my retreating form with a blankness on his face which suggested he saw, in fact, nothing, and I marveled at the vehemence of his advice. When had his “call” come, I wondered, and how, and what had brought him here? Stranger still, what kept him? A thousand questions occurred.

  Yet we human beings are all, I reflect, like planets which revolve throughout the great darkness of the universe. Sometimes our orbits bring us perilously close to one another; other times, we collide with a great explosion of sparks; but more often than that, we simply spin on in ignorance, through the vast globy blackness of space.

  Reasons for pursuing Miss Dory Cantrell:

  1. As previously noted elsewhere in this journal, I have never been so strongly attracted to a member of the female sex in all my life. All other emotions felt or imagined felt for others, including Miss Melissa Hamilton, now seem as bagatelles.

  2. Her beauty and fresh purity have a salubrious effect upon my spirits: elevating, it seems, my capacity to appreciate beauty and to respond to the world around me—a capacity which has been all too near extinction in recent months. My intellect trembles with my body as I consider, again and again, that kiss . . .

  3. (Not unrelated to #2) I have the sense that her continuing presence in my life would keep me attuned to my so
ul, would prevent my sinking again in the depths of nervous despair which have been my environs from time to time . . .

  4. She appears to encourage my pursuit, and furthermore, she is unattached.

  5. She possesses an innate sense of the finer things of life—a sense which I could encourage, enhance, and mold; I could enrich her life.

  Reasons to forget Miss Cantrell entirely:

  1. She is not of the same social class.

  2. She is ignorant and largely uneducated; such a gap exists between us that it could never be truly bridged, not even by any attempt on my part to educate her.

  3. To encourage her affections might be to make the remainder of her life too bleak to be borne, such a life as I know she is destined to live (*Aldous Rife).

  4. It would be immoral to take advantage of her innocence, and impossible not to do so.

  5. My preoccupation with her is drawing me away from my original intentions in coming to this place: to make my separate peace with God, to do my part in trying to educate these poor children, and to delineate my future plans—in which, it is becoming increasingly clear to me as I set down this list, Miss Cantrell can play no part!

  6. Her father and her brothers would kill me.

  I therefore resolve:

  1. Attend to the state of my soul.

  2. Throw myself into my teaching. Schedule a holiday pageant, perhaps?

  3. Exercise regularly.

  4. Socialize in the town, but

  5. Do not encourage Mrs. Justine Poole either.

  Notes on the state of my soul

  Five weeks have passed since last I saw Dory Cantrell. I have occupied my intellect primarily in an assiduous attempt to clarify, for myself, my religious values. Aldous Rife has been surprisingly helpful. He understands my decision not to attend his own church, that sad staid little building which appropriately faces the courthouse in the middle of town. In fact it was he who nudged me in the direction of the Freewill Followers at the mouth of Grassy, near Tug, and in fact quite close to this schoolhouse which has become my second home.

  I wanted, I repeat, to find a form of worship free of those Catholic constraints imposed upon the spirit by the Episcopal Church.

  I have found it.

  The Freewill Followers, who number no more than forty in all, meet in a cabin set in a lovely, lush little meadow by the side of Grassy Creek. Save for the “old rugged cross” attached to the roof beam, this cabin could well be a schoolhouse; in fact, it may have so served in the past. Indoors, the rough-hewn benches are arranged on two sides of the room—one side for men, and one for women. A rough box-like pulpit in the front houses Brother Autry Lily, who comes here by mule from Roseann to “bring the message,” as they say, every second Sunday, and the lay leaders, like the ancient but actually quite effective Hester Little, who come forth from the congregation to bring their own interpretations of the Word.

  I have served as altar boy at St. Stephen’s Church, Richmond.

  I have worshiped at Notre Dame.

  I have worshiped at Chartres!

  Yet never have I experienced the sense of majesty and trepidation—of awe at the literal presence of God—which I have found within these mud-chinked walls. It is as if we travel back through time, back through the centuries. Let me describe a typical service.

  It is any Sunday morning, let us say late fall, let us say November, 10 A.M. No church bells ring. These mountaineers have bells, indeed, but they ring them to herald events: a baby’s birth, a death, an accident.

  I repeat—no church bells ring.

  The ever-present blue mist, which hugs the hollers and valleys all night long, begins to rise as the sun appears above Black Rock Mountain. At first the sun has no delineation at all, is nothing but a shapeless spectral brightness behind the mist. But the mist rises, and the sun burns it off by degrees, and degree by degree that sun appears until now at length it shines full over all this wild landscape, the sky blue and cold, the wind whipping through the skeletons of the trees and rattling the half-frozen leaves on the ground along the path, frisking those leaves across the path of those who are venturing forth to church, or to “meeting,” as they say. They come from their cabins here around Tug, from homeplaces all along Grassy Creek and Meeting House Branch and even farther, from the three mountains.

  They come on foot and on mules or horses, traveling these paths, and as I stand before the meeting house to watch their approach I know, although they do not, that I am here at the end of something, that these days soon shall pass from the face of the earth and that these people and all their kind shall pass as well. Construction of roads throughout the remote areas of this county will soon commence—is slated, in fact, for spring. The men who keep their cars and trucks now at Wall Johnson’s store will drive them straight up to their own doors. These mountains will open up, and much will be gained perhaps, but from the viewpoint of this sojourner, much will be lost as well. Within three years, I predict, rural electrification will proceed even here to Tug, and soon after, each cabin will boast a radio. And what a change will then be wrought! when news becomes actuality rather than week-old newsprint, or rumors spread mouth-to-mouth, enhanced and transmogrified in the telling . . .

  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 goe
s 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.