Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1952

by Wild Dogs of Drowning Creek (v1. 1)

  “Yes, sir. I brought that book we were talking about.” Randy approached. “You said I could bring it and read to you.”

  “All right, come ahead,” granted Tasman. “Tell your friend he can come along, too.”

  Randy glanced back. Jebs followed him slowly toward the cabin, his square face crestfallen. As they came close to Tasman, they saw a slight smile at the corners of the thin mouth.

  “I can hear a whisper a mile off,” said Tasman, with something of quiet triumph. “When you lose your sight, your hearing sharpens up. You said something to somebody, and the somebody whispered back. So I knew there were two of you. The same two boys who were here yesterday. Well, are you enjoying your stay?”

  “We’re a little bothered by wild dogs, Mr. Tasman,” said Jebs.

  “You are?” Tasman looked interested. “Sam Cohill mumbled something about them once.”

  “What’s more,” pursued Jebs, “Randy here thought for a while that he saw one of the dogs hop up and walk on its hind legs.”

  “On its hind legs,” repeated Tasman slowly. “Let’s hear about that.”

  While Jebs described the previous night’s excitements, Randy looked sharply into Tasman’s fixed, staring eyes. Their pupils looked, not black, but a pearly gray. Randy knew what cataracts were, and how they could blind a man. But was Tasman telling the truth about depending on his ears alone? Might he not be concealing some power to see, pretending to be blind for reasons of his own?

  “I would think,” said Tasman when Jebs had finished, “that your friend Randy is a little too full of stories about werewolves.”

  “Werewolves?” said Randy. “I’ve heard something about them, and seen some of those crazy horror movies. But—well, I don’t believe in them, that’s for sure.”

  “Lots of people do believe in them,” said Tasman quietly. “It’s an old, old superstition. It must go back to the beginning of time, and it’s known in every country of the globe. You can read about werewolves in old Greek and Roman writings, and just about the time America was first being colonized there were some accusations and trials in Europe.”

  “You mean, folks stood trial for turning into wolves?” demanded Jebs incredulously. “With judges and juries and prosecuting attorneys and all? What kind of evidence did they have against them?”

  “At the time, the evidence was considered pretty conclusive,” Tasman said, rather grimly. “You can find it in a book about werewolves written by Montague Summers. I read it years ago.

  “One case the book described was about Gilles Gamier, a Frenchman. He was convicted in 1573, as I remember. There were plenty of neighbors to say he turned into a wolf, and finally he confessed. They executed him. Then there was another case, about a man with almost the same name, Jean Grenier. He confessed, too. They gave him life imprisonment.”

  “But that’s a fairy tale,” protested Randy. “You’re talking about things happening in the 1500’s. Around that time, you had—”

  “You had William Shakespeare writing his plays,” interrupted Tasman smoothly. “You had Galileo proving that the earth moved around the sun, and Richard Grenville founding a colony down here on the Carolina coast—the Lost Colony they tell about in the pageant each summer. The 1500’s produced some of the greatest scientists and artists and heroes in history.”

  “And some of the greatest werewolves,” suggested Jebs.

  “Well, Montague Summers’ book contains the records. The one I liked best was a German werewolf called Peter Stumpf. There was a long list of signed witnesses, who swore they’d seen him change from a beast into a man.”

  “Willie Dubbin ought to be listening to this,” said Jebs. “He’d get chills and fever enough for a whole county. Say, Mr. Tasman, you remember that book right clearly.”

  “That’s another thing about being blind,” Tasman said. “You remember the books you read when you could see. You mull them over and over in your memory. But, speaking of books, you said you’d brought Lives of the Hunted ”

  Randy was standing almost close enough to touch Tasman. He decided to find out, once for all, if Tasman’s blindness was complete.

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “Here it is.”

  And he thrust the book swiftly and directly at Tasman, almost into the gaunt face.

  Randy’s movement was almost violently sudden, and the book came within three inches of striking Tasman’s nose. But Tasman’s fixed eyes did not shift or blink. Plainly he could not see, or he would have flinched involuntarily away.

  “Thanks for bringing it,” said Tasman. “All right, what’s the first story in it?”

  Randy looked at the table of contents. “It’s called Kragy the Kootenay Ram ” he said. “It’s about a mountain sheep, I guess.”

  “Mountain sheep,” repeated Tasman. “I used to like to be in the mountains. Wait, please.”

  He turned and shuffled back into the house. After a moment he returned, carrying an old kitchen chair in each hand.

  “Sit down, you two,” he invited. “Start reading, while I work in here.”

  Randy, watching him return through the open door into the half-gloomy interior, saw Tasman move confidently across the floor, put out a hand and find the back of a chair. The blind man sat down before a sort of work bench and dipped his hand into a metal pan.

  Randy began to read Ernest Thompson Seton’s absorbing story of the heroic ram of the Rocky Mountains.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  TASMAN'S STORY

  Listening to the adventures of Krag, Tasman took from his pan a lump of clay, gray and dripping wet. He worked it furiously in his hands, dipped it into the water several times, and finally brought it to the soft, workable consistency he wanted. Then he slapped it down at the very center of his bench, on a round wooden platform that was fixed there, like a primitive plate or dish. His feet reached for a treadle like that of a sewing machine, set on a pivot under the bench. He worked the treadle, faster and faster, and the platform began to turn swiftly. While it spun around, Tasman’s hands made themselves busy with the clay.

  Randy glanced up between paragraphs, watching briefly. Jebs, quiet in his own chair, became absorbed in Tasman’s work. Tasman kept dipping one hand into the pan for palmfuls of water to sprinkle on the clay, while the fingers of the other quested along the lump’s outer edge. Those fingers acted like the blade of a lathe against a turning block of wood. The clay gradually changed shape to a thick bunlike disk, still spinning around and around. Then Tasman shifted his hand carefully toward the center, and the boys could see the shape change again as it revolved.

  The inside dipped down and the outer rim rose until it resembled a heavy saucer. Tasman’s thumb came into play, and as the saucer continued to turn it grew narrower and higher, becoming a bowl, a cup. It assumed the shape of a large, thick-walled drinking tumbler, while Tasman’s foot kept the treadle going and the horizontal potter’s wheel turning.

  And he did all this almost as though he were not thinking about it at all. His ears listened eagerly to the tale of a wild lamb that grew, its horns appearing and curving nobly out, its little body growing into a big body. While Randy sketched the growth of a lamb into a ram, Tasman’s skilful fingers seemed to spin the lump of clay into a gracefully curved and flaring vase.

  But it was not to finish as a vase. At length, Tasman stopped his treading foot. As the vase stood still, he explored its wet, plastic lip with his fingers. Then he deftly pinched it at one point into a pitcher-mouth. Taking another bit of clay from the pan, he rolled it between his palms into a little rod, and bent this to join on as a handle, above and below. Randy paused in his reading, and both he and Jebs looked on in admiring wonder.

  “I never saw the beat of that before,” confessed Jebs.

  Tasman’s slight, brief smile flashed at them. “It takes a little doing,” he said. “I learned potterymaking when I was years younger than you two. My whole family makes pottery—what the educated folks call ceramics—up in the western part of Nor
th Carolina.”

  Carefully he lifted the pitcher from the wheel, and set it aside to dry. “Are you tired of reading?” he suggested.

  “No,” said Randy. “I’ll catch my breath and go ahead.”

  Again he took up the story of Krag. While he read of the brave ram’s leadership of his mountain flock, and the half-crazy pursuit of Krag by a hunter who swore to collect that majestically horned head, Tasman prepared another lump of clay. He fashioned a second pitcher, and then a third, while Randy continued the story to its end, with both Krag and his human destroyer going down to death. All three were fascinated by the narrative, and when it was finished, Tasman set his last pitcher to dry with the others.

  “That’s not the sweetest story ever told, boys,” he observed, “but that’s the way of life. When folks tell you that nature is always kind, they’re being too short and simple. Nature can be rough, too.”

  “I reckon I go along with that, Mr. Tasman,” said Jebs. “Nature raises up whole nations of animals, and nature destroys them again, too. Maybe when a hunter kills an animal, right quick and painless, he could be saving it from a worse death.”

  “Yes,” said Tasman, pushing back his chair. “Any animal—one as strong and smart and brave as that Krag ram your friend was reading about—may live long enough to get old. When that happens, he’s in a fix. He can die pretty miserably if he’s old, or crippled—or blind.”

  He shut his mouth, with an audible snap of his teeth. Then he smiled, as though it took an effort to do so.

  “I think I owe you kids an explanation,” he went on. “That mountain-life stuff in the story carried me back in my own thoughts. I used to live in the mountains, just like I told you.”

  “The North Carolina mountains?” prompted Jebs. “Right. I reckon there’s been a Tasman in the North Carolina mountains since ’way back to the first settlers. A Tasman fought at Kings Mountain in the Revolution. There was a Tasman in Congress about the time of Andrew Jackson. My grandfather was in the Thirty-second North Carolina Infantry that nearly got wiped out on the second day at Gettysburg. And long before I was born, Tasmans made pottery, plain and fancy. For quite a spell of years, my folks did right well at pottery-making, because they got to selling their work in tourist towns—Asheville, Hendersonville, and so on—for the visitors to buy for souvenirs.”

  “Sounds like a good job,” Jebs offered.

  “Think so, boy? It might be, if you liked it. But I was sort of different from the rest of my folks. Potterymaking’s an indoor career, and I wanted to be outdoors.”

  Pausing, Tasman shuffled to the doorway, and sat down on the sill. His sightless eyes turned here and there, as if striving to see the clearing and the trees.

  “I purely loved the mountains,” he resumed. “You feel on top of everything when you’re a mountain man. You realize why they call that part of North Carolina the Land of the Sky.” His eyes turned upward for a moment. “Well, I made pottery with the rest of the family while I was a kid, but I managed to get a scholarship. I went off to college—to Davidson College, near Charlotte. I studied science and natural history. I wanted to spend my life learning and telling about the animals and plants of the mountains; maybe even writing books about them.”

  “That would be a good life, too,” said Randy.

  “You sound as if you might know what I mean, son. Well, when I finished college, I went back to the mountains. My mother’s father had died, and he willed me a little farm he’d owned, off in Jackson County. Lowlanders might laugh at a place like that. I guess it had more acres stood up on end than set flatwise. But it was high living, any way you want to use those words. Why!” Tasman’s sinewy hands gestured eloquently. “Standing up there on a tall point of those mountains, and looking northward toward Asheville, you can see the peaks of the Balsams, so far away it makes you dizzy to think of the distance; and farther still, the Black Mountains, all covered with trees, and Mount Mitchell poking highest. And westward, you see the Smokies, and nearer in around you the peaks like Pisgah and Hogback and Whiteside, with rivers and lakes kind of caught in among them, like little trickles and puddles in the hands of giants. You boys go there some day, and see the beauty I can’t tell you.”

  “You know the truth?” said Jebs. “I’ve never really been to the mountains, except Chimney Rock and Bat Cave. I’ve lived all my life in North Carolina, and I’m ashamed to say I never got up there.”

  “And the big things aren’t any better than the little ones,” went on Tasman, swiftly and eagerly. “I used to watch the birds—the little Carolina wren, and the cardinals, and the woodpeckers and the mountain ravens. I’ve stood where I thought I was about as high as a man could get, and I’ve seen a hawk sliding back and forth above me, so far up there that by comparison I might as well have been in a hole at the bottom of a valley. And the animals, too—wildcats, bears, foxes, and squirrels and rabbits and deer, just like the beginning of time. And flowers more than any tongue could tell.”

  “You make me wish I could see them,” said Randy. “The people, too.”

  “The people!” echoed Tasman. “Mountain folks are fine folks. They live simply, but they’re happy. They work hard and they play hard. The play-parties I’ve been too, and the square dances—with fiddle and guitar and accordion all playing the old songs! Of course, I had to work my farm, but I liked that. It was a sort of three-story farm.”

  “Three-story farm?” said Jebs after him. “How do you mean?”

  “I had corn patches, on three terraced places on the side of a slope. I’d get up there and chop weeds, cultivate, see the corn ripen, and harvest it. It took two mules to haul a wagon up from one patch to another, and those mules needed all eight of their feet for brakes on the way down. Past my place ran a stream, from way up the mountain—one little cascade after another, maybe a hundred in all. I called it Hundred Falls. Here and there it made quiet pools, and there were trout in there. I used to fish for them. Trout’s wonderful for breakfast. I reckoned to live my whole life up there, happy every day till my last one. But now—” His hands rose to his somber face.

  “But the lights started to get dim. Then they got gloomy. A doctor told me I was going blind, and when he told me that I was so scared and sick that I broke him off in the middle of what he was saying. I called him names and walked out of his office. But he’d said the truth. And I had to give up my farm.” “You had to sell it?” suggested Jebs, his own face tragic.

  “No, I couldn’t stand to do that. I rented it to a man I knew, and dragged myself back home to make pottery for a living. The darker things got, the more I learned to depend on my fingers and ears. But my folks—my uncles and cousins—seemed to think that this bad luck served me right. They hadn’t liked my quitting the family business to be a farmer. They let me come back and work with them, but I didn’t need eyes to know they were sneering. And anyway, the mountains aren’t for a blind man.”

  “I think I know what you mean,” said Randy.

  “Do you? Do you know what it means to be afraid to take a step outdoors without somebody leading you, for fear you’ll fall off a ledge or down a slope? I had to come to some place where it’s flat, here in the lowlands, so I could make a bluff at taking care of myself.”

  “And you do take care of yourself,” Randy said.

  “I get my farm rent, and I ship my pottery back to shops in the mountains, that will take all I make to sell. I pay those Indians who run errands for me. I make it worth their while. Here around this cabin, I know my way. I’m not beholden to anybody.”

  “Of course not,” agreed Randy, closing the book. Tasman started at the slight noise of the covers coming together.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t say that much to you, Randy,” he relented. “I’m much obliged for your reading to me.

  Jebs got up. “If you don’t mind, Mr. Tasman, I’d like to see some of your pottery.”

  “Well, come inside,” invited Tasman, and they followed him in.

  The cabin’s
interior was dim, and they moved slowly. But Tasman, sightless as he was, moved around it with the assurance of complete familiarity.

  In one corner, a cot was neatly made up with patchwork quilts and a pillow. Opposite stood an oil stove. Tasman stepped past his potter’s wheel and touched with his hands a tier of shelves against the wall.

  “Here’s a batch, almost dry enough to glaze and bake,” he said.

  There were rows of cups and saucers, vases large and small, sugar bowls, cream pitchers and plates.

  “Do you get your clay around here?” asked Randy.

  Tasman shook his gray head. “No, I have it shipped to me from near where I used to live. I still have that much of mountain soil here around me.”

  “You said you baked this pottery, Mr. Tasman,” said Jebs.

  “There’s a little kiln out behind the cabin.”

  “How do you know when a batch is ready to come out?”

  Tasman smiled his tense, tight smile. From the lowest shelf he lifted a big, cheap pocket watch and held it out. The crystal was missing.

  “I touch the hands to tell time,” he said. “And I can judge the right heat by holding my hand close to the kiln. My sense of feeling is like my sense of hearing—mighty sensitive, more sensitive than the feeling of sighted folks. For instance,” he added, “I know that it’ll be raining before sundown. You two had better get started for home.”

  “We’ll do that thing,” agreed Jebs. “It’s been nice talking to you, sir.”

  “And I’ll bring the book and read some more,” promised Randy.

  “Thanks, do that. Good-bye.”

  They started for the trail. Now that Tasman had mentioned it, there was a close, heavy feel to the air around them, and the clouds overhead shut out the sky like a great dull sheet of gray lead.

  “He’s completely blind, all right,” Randy said to Jebs when they were out of hearing. “I almost bumped him in the nose with this book, and he didn’t know it. Too bad, when he loves nature like that.”