But I had not covered more than a few verses before I realized that the women were listening not to me but to the stories Miss Alice had chosen. Somehow their absorption made me forget myself so that I too was caught up in the words: “A certain man had two sons . . .” It was the familiar parable of the Prodigal Son. “And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him . . . Let us eat and be merry: for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost and is found . . .”
In this tranquil room the ancient words had life in them. Suddenly I realized that the language of Scripture did not sound strange to these women because the King James translators had been closer to the Cove speech than was present-day English. Every day I heard “Aye” and “verily” and “at cock-crow” and “thrice” and “brutish” and “noisome” and “hireling.”
When I paused at the end of the parable, there was only the faint hissing of the apple logs on the fire and the echo of Miss Alice’s soft footsteps in the kitchen. The concentration of the group was so intense that it was almost palpable.
Then Miss Alice came back into the room and settled herself in the red wing chair and took the Bible. It was soon apparent that she had selected the passages with one thought in mind: she wanted these women to hear for themselves the assurance and reassurance in the Scriptures of the love of God for them. She made few comments, just let the passages speak their own message.
Whether from the Old Testament or the New, one by one the verses were laying a perfectly fitting mosaic—a picture of God as a Father who loves us more than any earthly father could; who knows our needs before we ask Him, but who still wants us to come and ask confidently as any rightful son or daughter should. It was the unforgettable picture which Jesus had etched in such earthy words of His Father going after a single lost and bruised lamb; of God, the Father, running down the road to receive any child who has been in a far country and who at last wants to come home.
I sat there entranced as I watched Miss Alice. I had noticed that in her presence often I would have big thoughts, ideas that went so far beyond my usual ones that they astonished me. It was not so much what Miss Alice said that sparked the thoughts, rather what she was.
Even now on the perimeter of my mind, new ideas hovered and darted, some of them just eluding me. Miss Alice seemed to think that once the poverty-stricken highlanders gripped the fact of God’s love for them—even for them—then in time they would have everything else they needed. But how was that? Would their really believing in a loving and adequate God end fear, for example? Or poverty? What would it do to educational needs? Or how would it affect their belief in superstitious magic?
But now Miss Alice closed the Bible and was bringing this part of the morning to a close with the prayer that the group had requested. Her words were informal and direct, clothed in no liturgy at all. In the simplest kind of way they were directed at God’s adequacy to meet human problems. After all, the needs of these women were real—as solid as the earth on which they walked and the garden dirt in which they dug, as substantial as the mountains that towered over them; as near as pain and disease and childbirth. In their simplicity, they knew about the need for daily bread. So once again, a towering thought came to me. True prayer then, can be rooted only in the recognition of genuine need.
“Aaa-men,” Granny Barclay pronounced resoundingly. “I fancy that. Miz Henderson, your talk would put heart in a hollow log. Ye make the Almighty seem—come-at-able.”
“Aye, makes my soul happy,” Aunt Polly agreed. “Not like most preacher-persons always hollerin’ about the hell-fires. Been hearin’ them talk that-a-way ever since I was a slip of a girl. They’d start out slow, but as soon as they’d git limbered up and goin’ good, they’d take to poundin’ and poundin’ their fists on the pulpits, sweat rollin’ off’n their faces . . . wipin’ and wipin’, till Lord holp my time of day, seemed like they’d crept a leetle too close to them fires theirselves.”
The blue eyes blazed in the wrinkled face as the voice went on, “All my born days them preacher-men made me think I was backslidin’ down the slippery path to hell. But when I hit my seventieth name day and still couldn’t feel no singein’ from them fires, I calculated that from thar on in, I’d jest disremember about all them devils, pearten up, and let the fires roar on without me.”
Granny Barclay shook her finger at the old woman. “Pollyanne Dillingham Teague, ye have a sassy tongue in your head.”
“Fiddlesticks! Better than bein’ a say-nothin’ person.”
Tactfully Miss Alice changed the subject. “Granny, I want to show Miss Christy your quilt. It’s a nice pattern. What do you call it?”
“Hearts and Gizzards. Here ’tis.”
I moved for a closer look. “Is it an old pattern?”
“Aye. Mostly the patterns was handed down.”
“It’s beautiful!”
“But weavin’ is a heap purtier than quiltin’.” Fairlight Spencer spoke with feeling. “Sometimes I hanker after it, a-sittin’ on the weavin’ bench, watchin’ the blossoms come out and smile at you from the kiverlid.”
Her words seemed to make all of the older women nostalgic. Weaving was apparently almost a lost art in the Cove.
“You know, store-bought clothes don’t wear a-tall,” Aunt Polly offered more quietly, now that she was off theology and onto more domestic matters. “Thar’s something about a-settin’ and trompin’ the treadles—nothing can fret a-body then. Granny, ain’t I seen a footpower loom in your yard?”
“Aye, ain’t nobody used it in years. Nobody exceptin’ the chickens, that is. They like it for roostin’. I memorize how I used to make up ballads to the hum of the shuttle and the thud of the loom beatin’ up the web. It was purely a pleasure, that it was.”
Miss Alice had been listening carefully. “How hard would it be to start weaving again? Do any of you remember how?”
Aunt Polly answered promptly. “Shorely! Granny Barclay and I know. We made our weddin’ kivers together.”
“And in my loft,” Fairlight Spencer said eagerly, “I’ve got a heap of drafts that come from Scotland. Belonged to my mama, and her mama before her.”
“What are drafts?”
“Patterns for weavin’ the de-signs. Come from the other side of the water. Pieces of paper, rolled up, tied with black thread. Look kind of like music. Tell you how to make Queen Anne’s De-light, Trailin’ Vine, Young Man’s Fancy, Whig Rose, Road-in-the-wilderness.”
“You know, some of my friends in Pennsylvania and Miss Christy’s in Asheville would leap at the chance to buy handwoven things. I’m sure they would. What would you think about doing some weaving to sell?”
“If you mean for cash-money,” Mrs. McHone answered, “that would sorely be welcome.”
The group was immediately enthusiastic. “Think ye,” Granny Barclay asked, squinting and wiping her eyes, “that we could use the new wagon that Miz Christy holped us git, t’ tote my loom? Could you holp us find som-wheres to set it up, Miz Henderson?”
“Certainly I could.”
“What about the dyeing?” Clara asked.
“Ain’t hard.” Granny sounded a little smug. “Walnut and butternut hulls for browns and blacks. Pokeberries made lavender. Hic’kry bark makes the lastingest yeller ever ye seed. Madder’s for red and pink, and—”
“But blue’s best of all,” Aunt Polly interrupted her. “How-somever, we’d have t’ put off till August to set the blue pot. Indigo don’t bloom till then. My mamma had a blue pot that’s in our barn yit.”
“Don’t you use any brought-on dyes?” Ruby Mae asked. She and Liz Ann and Clara seemed to know as little about these old-time skills as I did.
Aunt Polly rolled up her quilt scraps and rose to her feet. “Don’t fancy boughten colors for wearin’-clothes. Fade right away. Wal, got to take my foot in hand and git along home.” As the meeting broke up, the women were s
till chattering, full of plans for the future.
I stayed to help Miss Alice wash up the Limoges china and put it carefully back into place in the corner cupboard. While we were washing dishes, I questioned, “By the way, what’s wrong with Granny Barclay’s eyes?”
“I’m afraid it’s trachoma. The eyes get irritated and bloodshot from granulations on the lids. A lot of itching and burning and discharge. Eventually, the eyeballs harden, you know, and the sight gets progressively worse.”
“It seems as if there’s a lot of eye trouble around here. I never saw so many crossed eyes before.”
“You’re right. The crossed eyes are probably from too much intermarrying. The trachoma is something else again. A real scourge. There’s a surprising amount of it—along with hookworm and typhoid and consumption. Dr. MacNeill helped persuade the Public Health Service to make a survey of parts of the Appalachians to see for themselves how much trachoma there was. That’s how we have the temporary eye hospital in Lyleton. Many a Saturday Neil takes a wagonload of patients in there.”
“Oh! That reminds me—I’ve been wanting to ask you something about Dr. MacNeill . . . David hinted at a story about the doctor’s ancestors. Said something about a castle and for me to ask you sometime . . .”
She smiled at me, amused at my undisguised inquisitiveness. “Why not ask Neil?”
“I don’t know him that well.”
She rinsed out her dishcloth, carefully hung it over the side of the sink, dried her hands, and took off her big apron. “It’s a good story all right. And you don’t really understand the mountain people until you’ve heard it. You want it now? Can you spare another fifteen or twenty minutes?”
“Of course!”
“Well then, let’s see—where shall I begin?” She was talking as we made our way back to the fire. I relaxed, curled up on the rug near the hearth. The red chair set off Miss Alice’s light hair, and there was a faraway look in her eyes. As the story unfolded, it carried us both out of the quiet, firelit room in Cutter Gap, Tennessee, back . . . back across space, through time to the summer of 1745 in Scotland . . .
“It seems that Neil MacNeill, ancestor of the doctor, born in oh, something like 1720, lived in a castle on the Island of Barra in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. The nearest town, I’m told, was a tiny port called Campbeltown. That year of 1745 this Neil had been visiting cousins and friends in New York and Philadelphia, then had gone on to Wilmington, North Carolina, and Cape Fear. He was over here to feel out a business venture. He and a friend named Baliol of the Island of Jura had gotten the idea of forming some sort of land-holding syndicate in the New World.
“But while they were away, hard times fell on the Highlands: That summer Prince Charles Edward, great-great-grandson of Mary, Queen of Scots, had determined to try to win back the throne of England and Scotland for the Stuarts. He’d hired a French frigate and landed on the Island of Eriskay. To the highlanders, he was the “Bonnie Prince”: twenty-four, tall, handsome, curly hair almost gold at the ends, large brown eyes. It was said that he could charm anyone out of all conscience.
“There are numbers of songs about him sung by the mountain people to this day. I heard little Sam Houston singing one of them in a thin piping voice just last week when I returned some candle molds to his mother:
‘Come o’er the stream, Charlie,
Dear Charlie, brave Charlie,
Come o’er the stream, Charlie,
And dine with McLean.
And though you be weary
We’ll make your heart cheery,
And welcome our Charlie,
And his royal train.’
“But ‘dear Charlie’s, brave Charlie’s’ coup had failed. The promised French help never came. Many of the clans never did rise to the support of Charles Edward, and the highlanders were defeated by the English in the bloody massacre of Culloden Moor in April, 1746.
“Well, when Neil MacNeill returned to Scotland in November of 1746, somehow he still had not heard about the disaster at Culloden, nor did he know the situation he was heading into in the Highlands. Communication was slow in those days.
“Details of that homecoming have been handed down in the doctor’s family: How Neil strode over the ancient bridge across the moat to his beloved castle Kisimul, pausing to look back at the tossing sea and the wild headlands that he loved. Every detail of his ancestral home was just as he had remembered it. There were the desolate peat bogs where the peewit cried, the wine-red hills beyond. There were the Hebridean “black houses” of his people, thatched roofs weighed down with stones. There was the odor of burning peat and the smell of the inescapable fish industry. And inside the damp stone castle, there was still the deep glow of polished walnut and mahogany, the ancestral portraits on the walls. But there was a change—ordinarily there would have been a lamb roasting on a spit on the gigantic fireplace. There was none; food was very scarce.
“It was then that Neil learned the hard facts. After Culloden his father had been taken prisoner along with some thirty-five hundred other Highland men. No one knew what had happened to him, though they did know that seven hundred odd had died from their confinement in filthy, overcrowded prisons, and that another one hundred and twenty had been hanged in London.
“The English government, thinking that clan loyalties were the basis of all the trouble, had passed the Disarming Act which, among other things, prohibited the wearing of any tartan garment. The Duke of Cumberland’s men, under order, were roaming the countryside, burning homesteads and grain, driving away cattle. Their aim was to destroy the economy—and they succeeded. So few men were left to provide for their families that many women and children were actually starving.
“Prince Charles Edward, with the help of many including Flora MacDonald—still a heroine among these North Carolina and Tennessee folk—had escaped back to France. A reward of thirty thousand pounds in English gold had been placed on his head. That much gold would have set up a poverty-stricken Highland community for the rest of its days. And many of the people might, understandably, have felt resentment at the Prince who had led them into such sorrow and trouble. Yet not a Highlander could be found who would touch a penny of the reward.
“But there had been even worse news for Neil. It was the last bitter dreg to learn that a great price had been put on his grandfather’s head, since he was Roderick, the thirty-ninth Chief of the Clan MacNeill. The frail old man had had to flee the castle to live in a cave somewhere in the mountains. In fact, all of Argyllshire was full of clansmen hiding out, hunted like wild deer by Royalist troops, a price on every head. But the people were intensely loyal; they would not betray kinsfolk.
“Neil watched his Granny Jean, failing already before the tragedy, now all but out of her mind haunting the upper windows of the castle, her old eyes searching, searching—hoping, hoping.
“Naturally, the business venture which MacNeill and Baliol had evolved was out of Neil’s head at once, of no consequence compared to the suffering around him. He had friends in London and legal contacts, so he went there to see if he could get any relief or alleviation for the Highlanders. Neil did not succeed, but there in London his solicitor, William Dick, pointed out to him the one legal loophole left: because he had been out of the country during all of the Rebellion, his portion of the family fortune could not be touched by the English Government.
“So after much thought, Neil decided to buy a ship and offer to transport to North Carolina as many of his countrymen as wanted to emigrate.
“Thus in the spring of 1747 there was jubilation on the docks of Campbeltown as four hundred and eighty Scottish men and women sailed in Neil’s ship The Curlew for America and a new life. Now they would be able to wear all the tartan they pleased, to speak their native Gaelic, to make a living without having it wrested from them, to sing as they worked, yes, rousing Jacobite songs if they wanted to. The townspeople went wild on the docks that morning: The Curlew meant for them freedom—freedom to breathe, freedom
to be! And Neil MacNeill of Barra watched with tears streaming down his cheeks.
“He did not himself sail with that first group. There were still business details to be concluded since he intended to shuttle The Curlew back and forth so long as his funds lasted.
“Word had been received from other fugitives that Neil’s grandfather had died as a result of the months of exposure and hardship. Now Neil’s mother took Granny Jean’s place at the upper windows of the castle, her eyes searching the sweeping uplands and the misty glens, listening to the bleating of the few sheep left and the cries of the seabirds, hoping, always hoping to see a familiar figure striding across the moor. But the weeks and the months went by and Neil’s father did not come. They never learned what his fate had been.
“At last Neil put his estate in the hands of a solicitor and appointed trustees. (His family had always been canny business men.) He provided for Granny Jean and for his mother, who refused to leave so long as there was any hope left that her husband was alive, and for their retainers and the upkeep of the Castle Kisimul. The rest of the profits from the rents and the mercantile business which he had inherited, would be used to bring immigrants to America.
“With him, at the second sailing of The Curlew, Neil brought some mementoes of the hoary old castle. Perhaps you’ve seen them, Christy, in his namesake’s cabin—a cherry chest of drawers, a low chair with a spindled back, an English mantel clock, that pipe of his with the silver band inscribed in Gaelic, some smaller things.
“Up to that time Neil had been a bachelor, too preoccupied to think of romance. On the long voyage to North Carolina, he met Flora Riddell and fell in love with her. They were married at Wilmington soon after they landed.
“In all, The Curlew made four round trips. Neil was personally responsible for bringing some eighteen hundred Scottish folk to the New World. At first they settled in the established farming communities near the coast. But the newcomers from Scotland with their strange dress and speech, their violent convictions and prejudices and reckless sincerities, seemed savage to the townspeople. And in no time at all, the exiles were homesick for the sight of a mountain, longed to find a spot which they could call theirs for their ‘ain folk.’
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