On Agate Hill

by Lee Smith

  “Why, what they want is the Old Hoot Owl!” Molly broke in. “She’s this old lady at Gatewood,” she explained to Professor Boykin.

  We all laughed. A bee flew in the window. Then Felix Boykin smiled, holding out his open hands. Clearly he still had a touch of the preacher in him, after all these years. “Agnes and Molly, it is entirely up to you. Certainly you cannot be expected to keep a contract whose terms were never disclosed. But if you choose to take on this school, I want you to know what you are getting into.”

  I liked him immensely.

  “We’ll do it!” I said, standing up. “We like a challenge, don’t we, Molly?” Of course I did not tell him that we had only nine dollars between us and nowhere else in the world to live.

  “I can’t wait,” Molly said immediately. Her eyes were as blue and clear as the Ashe County sky outside the academy windows.

  It took a few days more to prepare for the trip. Felix sent out a call for books and supplies; the townspeople responded generously. Though I found these items quite worn and used, I knew I could not complain, as we would have nothing there, and these were all that could be got on such short notice.

  Meanwhile, Martha Fickling fattened us up as if for the kill, giving us the lowdown all the while. Even at night she could not stop, sitting on the end of our bed smoking cigarettes and drinking glassfuls of her own peach brandy, telling stories until I thought I should expire from sheer exhaustion. We learned that the entire county had been split during the War, brother turned against brother, and many awful deeds done by the “bushwhackers.” We learned that Nigger Mountain got its name because its caves had hidden escaping slaves headed north. We heard about the man who had looked into a spring up on Bluff Mountain and saw something so terrifying that he “had not spoke since,” to this day.

  “I like you girls,” Martha told us that last night, “and Lord knows, I wish you well, but it’s a hard row you’ve got to hoe up there, as a schoolteacher.”

  “Why?” Molly sat up straight in the bed.

  “Well, they’ll all be trying to marry you off, or marry you, like young Johnny there” — she winked at Molly, referring to the young stationmaster who had been driving us crazy for the last two days — “or else they will turn agin you, for something they think you’ve done, or how they think you look, or who knows what all, and then they’ll gang up against you, and church you, and they might even turn you out. Why students has been known to turn a schoolteacher out theirselves if they didn’t like them. They smoked one out up on Rip Shin.”

  “Well, they most certainly will not!” I had never heard of such a thing.

  “Hell, they was a bunch that churched me,” Martha announced, tossing back her brandy. “It was years ago, right here in this town, when the old man died. But I didn’t care then, and don’t care now. And you know what? I have outlived them all, goddamnit, ever one that did that. So it don’t mean a thing to me.” We proceeded to learn entirely more than I wanted Molly to hear about Martha’s earlier life, how her daddy had “run off” and her mama had “got shot” and her granny had “died of her lungs” and Martha herself had “got a job cooking at the lumber camp up on Buffalo” when she was “naught but a girl,” and how the owner, an old man, had “took up with me,” as she put it, tossing her brassy curls, “and it don’t matter what you think about that, either one of you, and whether you like it or not. Sometimes there can come an attraction between two people, even people as unlikely as we was, that is going to last though all hell breaks loose and longer than death, which is why I have got this nice house here that you all are a-sitting in right now, he heired it to me, and there was not a damn thing that old wife of his nor anybody else could do about it! So there!” She laughed and slapped her dimpled knee. “I swear, I’m going to miss you girls! Maybe I’ll ride up on Bobcat before long and see how you are making out.”

  “Please come,” Molly said immediately. Molly was fascinated by Martha Fickling, and why not? For this story was the exact opposite of all those dreary moral tales we had had them read on Sundays at Gatewood Academy.

  The next morning we were up and ready before full light, tiptoeing down the stairs and through the dining room and the shadowy sitting room where I saw not one but two heads poking above the covers in Martha Fickling’s big brass bed as we passed by. I didn’t say a word, hoping that Molly wouldn’t notice. “Hi-ho! Hi-ho!” the parrot sang. “Damn your eyes!”

  Our fully packed wagon stood in the street, with two new additions. A rough-looking boy in a brown slouch hat slumped on the seat smoking a cigarette, a huge shaggy black dog beside him. He jumped down, ducked his head, and mumbled something, grabbing our bags and tossing them up into the back as if they were weightless. Even in the pale early light, we could tell that he was blushing furiously.

  “I am Miss Rutherford,” I said, “and this is Molly Petree.”

  “Yes’m.” He ducked his head.

  “What is your name?”

  “Cicero Todd, ma’am. They have sent me down here to get you, and I aim to get you there safe.” He appeared mortified. Yet he handed me up with the greatest delicacy, though his hand was rough as a cob — but Molly jumped up herself, and we were off, down Jefferson’s main street in the early light, Cicero clicking to his horses. On either side of us the great dark mountains loomed, while above them the sky turned pearl, then pink. “Oh Agnes, look,” Molly said, clutching my hand.

  I felt my soul expand to meet the country as we traveled those bumpy roads which were to become as familiar to me as the back of my hand. Ashe County remains the most beautiful part of the earth I have ever seen, with its great rounded mountains swooping up beyond green pastures and white farm houses and log cabins and the occasional tiny church, all under God’s blue arch of sky. Under duress, Cicero pointed out Bluff Mountain, Paddy Mountain, and the immense Three Top Mountain, with its pointed peaks. “He hates us,” Molly whispered, but I assured her — though privately I was not so sure — that he was “just shy.” We forded creeks, passed through dense pine forests as black as night, and once crossed a windy bald with long blue views in every direction. Twice Molly and I got down and walked with Cicero to lighten the load as we went up a long steep grade, though he protested. Now we could see the sparkle of the New River off to our right whenever the trees parted.

  “Hit ain’t far now,” Cicero announced suddenly as we rode along the spiny top of a ridge he identified as Pisgah. We soon turned off on a trace to the right — it was scarcely a road — passing several little cabins almost invisible back in the trees, and wound up the last long bend to the top of a sunny rise where stood the Bobcat School with old Memorable Jones himself standing out in front of it, his entire body bent into an S-shape, leaning on his cane, waiting for us. His gray hair streamed down his back. As Cicero drew the wagon to a stop, people began pouring out of the schoolhouse, brandishing homemade brooms and cloths. Children ran everywhere like chickens.

  “What in the devil taken you so long?” Memorable Jones said to Cicero, not smiling. Then “Ladies,” he said, “you have come a fur piece. Get down and let us take a look at you.” Now it was our turn to blush. “Well,” he concluded, “you are younger than expected, though you look right smart, and healthy enough, I reckon, though you” — he poked his stick at me — “might be a little stouter. Well, you’ll have to do, I reckon. Come on, come on. We have got a great deal of work to do here, and time’s a-wasting!”

  “Don’t pay no attention to Papaw, he is just awful sometimes!” A freckle-faced woman in a red kerchief ran over to us. “I’m Chattie Badger, and youuns is going to stay with me. We live right over the mountain there” — she flung out her arm — “at Chestnut Hill, and it’s as pretty a place as can be. You’ll like it.”

  The rest of that day was a blur, as we joined in the cleanup of the Bobcat School. We met so many people at once that I was sure I could never put their faces with their names — Vannoy, Barker, Shoemaker, Roop, Sizemore, Hamby, Sprinkle, Bra
y. They had come with buckets, scrub brooms, rakes, scythes, and mattocks. Men had been chopping weeds all morning, so that a schoolyard already existed, ready for games. It was bordered on one side by the most beautiful bank of wild white roses you can possibly imagine, and by the thick green forest on the other. Behind the school, they had gathered rocks to hold two washtubs over fires to heat water brought from the spring nearby, and were busily cleaning all the desks. The windows had already been washed. The empty floors had been swept and were now being scrubbed by the men. Windows and doors stood open to let in the hot August sun and to air out the two classrooms. Memorable Jones sat to the side on a large “table rock,” scowling and smoking his pipe. I dared not approach him — I could not have done so then if my life depended upon it!

  The last thing they did was hang the bell on a post in front of the school. We finished up and left just as the sun set red and gold over the distant river — our subsequent view from the Badgers’ long porch. I had never been so tired, but Molly appeared inexhaustible, playing Graces in the bare broom-swept yard with the girls, Tildy and Caro and Jane, while the boys — I couldn’t tell how many boys there were — tended to the animals and did their other chores. Chattie was a “widder woman,” her young husband having been killed in a sawmill accident. Cicero Todd carried in our bags and tipped his hat, scowling. He would not look at me as he waved away my offer of a dollar (to my immense relief).

  The following morning, Molly and I went back over to the Bobcat School. We arranged the desks, putting chalk, erasers, slates, a water pail and a dipper and a new broom (brought in and apparently made by Cicero) in place. We put all the books which we had brought — blueback spellers, Mc-Guffey’s Readers, Holmes’ Readers, arithmetics and grammars, Elementary Geography by Matthew Fontaine Maury, a few storybooks, a dog-eared Webster’s Dictionary and a couple of Bibles — behind the glass doors of a beautiful old handcarved wooden secretary which had been left in the building.

  The next day we took up school.

  I have the clearest image of Molly in her plain brown dress (for we had taken Martha Fickling’s advice to heart) ringing the bell as hard as she could while barefooted children straggled up the red hill, giggling and shy, swinging their little lunch buckets. A few carried hornbooks as well. The old bell, donated by the Methodist Church in Jefferson, was neither tinny nor mournful but had a lovely clear tone. It sounded like an invitation pealing out over the mountains. And here they all came, little boys and girls ranging in age from six to twelve or thirteen, so many more than we expected. I counted ten, twelve, fifteen, twenty, more. They would have to sit two to a desk. I stood at the door to welcome them. “Girls on the right, boys on the left,” I said, forming them into two lines. Oh how hopeful and sweet and scared they seemed, gap-toothed and grinning, holding hands, wiggling and wriggling, some of their clothes ill-fitting and threadbare but clean as could be for the opening of the Bobcat School.

  The days took us over then, one after another after another, week after week through that first long golden fall and into the winter, each day filled with its lovely moments and its trials.

  We divided the children into groups — Molly took the younger ones, who came forward first every morning to recite, toeing the chalk line we drew on the floor at the front of the room, while older students worked on their assignments in the back, reading or memorizing — much of this aloud, no wonder everybody started calling us the “blab school.” But repetition was necessary, as we didn’t have enough books to go round nor take home. At midmorning we turned them out for the privy, first girls, then boys, and then recess — they could not wait, running and jumping like rabbits. Next came arithmetic, then writing lessons, where we passed out the precious copybooks in which the older students copied out Bible lessons written on the board while the younger ones wrote their names and single words with only a quill at first — we could not spare the ink, while Molly moved among them to guide their hands.

  And finally, lunch. We cleared the desks and they sat at attention while each row went in turn for their lunchpails. In warm weather, we all went outside. In rain or cold, they ate at their desks, sandwiches or biscuits with apple butter, jelly, sometimes egg or ham. Several children of one family always brought “crumbly,” corn bread broken up in milk, carried in a tin syrup bucket with a lid. They gathered around the bucket to eat.

  Chores came after lunch: carrying firewood, fetching pails of water, followed by yet more games — oh, those games! Snap-the-whip, andy-over, mumbly peg. Girls played jump rope, chanting,

  Oh Dan Tucker was a fine old man,

  Washed his face in a frying pan.

  Combed his hair with a wagon wheel,

  And died of a toothache in his heel.

  We always began the afternoon session by reading them a story, for there is nothing like a story to calm even the most fractious child. Even little Shadrack Sturgill, who twitched all the time and had fits, did not move a muscle during story time. Being Mariah’s disciple, I often took this opportunity to impart a little lesson, for you could not imagine the living situations of some of our children, how impoverished their lives in terms of moral guidance and even conversation.

  I remember we had quite a discussion about “The Young Frog” from the Holmes’ Reader, for instance. This is a fable wherein a vain frog complains about her “dull, out of the way life”; against all advice, she leaves home and moves to town to make her fortune. But once in the city, she is soon devoured by a hungry duck. “Boys and girls, we should be satisfied,” decreed the Holmes’ Readers, for “it is a bad thing to think of ourselves more highly than we ought to think.” I closed the book. “Now, how do you like this story?” I asked them. It seemed like good advice to me, for these little lives proscribed by poverty and place.

  But instantly a hand was waving — Jesse Badger, of course, old Memorable Jones’s grandson, the smartest child in school. “Why, if a feller was to foller that, Miss Rutherford, he wouldn’t get noplace atall in the world, now would he?”

  I was taken aback. “Jesse is entirely right,” I said, changing my mind in an instant, for I hope I never grow too old to learn from a child. The next story I read to them was “The Emperor’s Clothes.”

  And so it went, grammar, geography, and history, then, at last, everybody’s favorite, spelling! And every Friday the beloved spelling bee, attended by many a parent, standing at the back. At the end of each school day, the children helped us clean the slates, put away the books, sweep the floor, and gather up the dippers. Then row by row they retrieved their jackets and lunch pails and stood by their desks until dismissed. I was very strict about all this, for I have found that children love order, and that it is good for them. It is good for us all — alas, poor Molly!

  But let us return to the days, the lovely ordered days, the hot sweet breeze in summer, bringing in the scent of the wild roses at the edge of the woods; or the smell of wet wool clothing in winter, when it was so hard to control the heat from our potbellied stove. Sometimes the classroom got so stuffy that we had to throw open the windows — ah, but then the icy wind came in. We either froze or roasted. Our woodstove was kept well supplied by Cicero Todd, glum and scowling as ever, his arrival every few days occasioning great excitement among the children, who were allowed to ride his huge dog Roy, fearful looking but endlessly patient with them. In fact, Roy seemed to enjoy this game as much as they did. Cicero Todd lived nearby in a little cabin he had built when he was practically a child, according to Chattie Badger. “Nobody knows where he came from, nor who his people was, nor how come him to fetch up here.” He was a skilled carpenter, though, making chairs and tables and beds, poplar dough boards, rolling pins, barrels, and buckets, as well as more desks for us. “There’s no harm in him,” Chattie decreed, so eventually I paid no attention as Cicero came and went, part of the endless weave of our days, like the coverlets Chattie wove rain or shine on her loom by the fire.

  That first year, only two incidents made a break in
this pattern.

  The first happened early on, when Molly had gone up to the blackboard to write out the day’s Bible verse for copying. Unbeknown to us, several of the boys had caught a blacksnake in a slip noose and put it in my desk drawer, coiled to look like it was still alive. There it lay when Molly opened the drawer to get the chalk. She did not cry out nor even mention it, just calmly picked up the end of the noose and dangled the snake in front of the class, causing several girls to scream and the children in the front to scramble backward, overturning one of the desks. Then she let the snake down on top of the desk in its loose coil, turned her back, and said, “Ready, boys and girls?” and turned to write the Bible verse on the board. Her color was high, her eyes practically gave off blue sparks, and I was so proud of her at that moment. Molly thrived at the Bobcat School, she really did. I have to believe this now.

  “For God so loved the world, that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish, but have Eternal Life,” she wrote in her lovely slanted hand, a credit to Gatewood Academy. The children had all begun to copy when suddenly the “dead” snake, being only stunned, slithered to life. It slid off the desk and went straight for Molly. The children screamed — myself, I am ashamed to say, among them. Molly turned around, calmly put down the chalk and grabbed up the end of the slip noose again, lifting the snake high above her head where it twisted gleaming in the sunlight until it went limp again. Then she walked straight down the middle of the aisle with it. You could have heard a pin drop until she came back inside and resumed the lesson, never once mentioning the snake.

  The second incident was more serious. Christmas had come and gone; it was the winter term. Many of the smaller children had been kept at home due to the severity of the weather, others because they did not have shoes or adequate clothing, and the “big boys” showed up, as promised. We had quite a time with three of them — Ira Lineback, Arthur Church, and Jemmy Vestal, who chewed tobacco in the schoolyard and spit it at the younger children’s feet, terrorizing them. Then they took a fat boy’s shoes and coat away — this was poor little Red Layless — and forced him to lie in the mushy snow and “make angels” all recess until he was freezing and sobbing. When he tried to get up, Ira kicked him in the nose, making it bleed, and he went back to making angels. The rest of the children were too afraid to tell us, so we knew nothing of it until they all came trooping in without him.