I looked at David again and saw him as I had first seen him: handsome, clean-cut, likable, and anxious to do the right thing. He was more uneasy now than I had ever seen him. Even in my own torment, compassion for him stirred within me.
“I’m sorry, David. You’re right. Of course, I’ll get over it. It’s just that I hurt now and I want something to stop the pain.”
David’s expression cleared. Once again he drew me to him. He stroked my hair and said softly, his lips brushing my cheek, “Christy, there isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you. You know that.”
“Yes, David. I know that.”
After a restless night, I got up shortly before dawn one Saturday morning, dressed hastily, and tiptoed out of the house. As I reached my woodland retreat on Coldsprings Mountain, the sun was just rimming the top of the far ranges. The sky was rosy, with streaks of golden light filtering through the trees. Dewdrops still glistened on the leaves. The woods were quiet, so quiet, save for my own footfall and an occasional bird call.
It was a beautiful morning. My eyes saw the beauty, but I could not respond to it. The anger against God that I had felt at Tom’s funeral, for which I had gotten no satisfactory answers, was compounded now. God? Where was God? Far away? Indifferent? Never there at all? A figment of man’s wishful imagining?
Or if there, then why had He not done something to prevent Fairlight’s death? What were a few typhoid germs in a human body as against the power of God unless—unless belief in a God of love and caring was just a hoax, a gigantic hoax. Unless Dr. MacNeill was right, and there was nothing but a machine-like universe that ran by “natural” law. And when the natural law went against you, it cut down the good and the beautiful along with the wicked and the profane. All alike, no difference. Just cosmic machinery. In that case it would not matter how we lived our lives—whether selfishly or unselfishly, whether good or evil. Willy-nilly, the steam roller flattened everyone in its path. Those who were not standing in its way were lucky, that was all. It was all a matter of how the wheel turned, how the dice fell.
So the bitter thoughts rolled and seethed inside me—too much inside me. Suddenly, sitting there on the hillside, I remembered the presentiment that had come to me on a higher hill that day when Fairlight and I had climbed the mountain. Then, with an intuitive knowing, I had been sure that indeed it does matter how we live our lives, that there is One who cares. Thinking of that, I knew that it was wrong not to speak out my rebellion to the One at whom it was directed. I could at least give Him a chance to defend Himself.
Speak it out! Yes, and act it out. It must have been my isolation that gave me the courage to let all constraint go. I heard myself saying aloud, “Why? Why? I’ve got to know why.” Then on my knees in a bed of dry leaves, I was flailing my fists on the earth as I saw in memory Fairlight’s lovely face. Never again on this earth would I see those perfect features. What my friend had feared most had come about. That gentle form, those pleading eyes were even now in a box covered with clay on the brow of the hill.
“Christy,” I could hear her voice again, “I git the trembles when I think of being put in a box and a-lyin’ out thar somewheres covered with dirt” . . . Dirt . . . Dirt. I scooped up a handful of the rich woodland loam and crushed it hard and tight in my fingers. Only dirt now for this one for whom doors to life had just begun to open, this one whose children needed her so; she who could have been the catalyst for so much that we wanted to do for the mountain women. The good and the beautiful cut down. Oh God! Oh, God—
I don’t understand, God! I don’t understand. I don’t understand Tom’s death and Fairlight’s death, and I don’t understand You. Why are You so inscrutable? Why are You so hard to find when the need is greatest? All that time when I was holding Fairlight in my arms, I could not get through to You. The ceiling of that room was like galvanized iron. I asked You for help. Did I plead with a void, God? Did I?
Gradually I quieted down. The rain of my words ceased. There was no answer immediately. I had not expected there would be. Yet the leafy quietness enfolded me, soothed me. I was aware of a thirst to drink deeply of the silence, the soothing silence. It was deep within me, yet also behind the façade of nature around me. The flesh of my body, sometimes sitting quietly, sometimes moving restlessly, was the exterior shell for the inner stillness; the scudding clouds and the tossing trees and the flying birds were the covering for that other stillness without.
I wanted to stay there a long time. But Miss Ida would be holding breakfast for me with that tight-lipped smile she reserved for latecomers, even those of us who had won our way into the small circle of people she approved. But I decided that I would return again and again to my mountain sanctuary until some response, some insights were given me. Or else, or else—there was always the stark alternative that there would never be any response because I was indeed speaking into nothingness.
I began setting my alarm clock for a quarter of six each morning. Then on the hillside propped against the trunk of my favorite locust tree, I would watch the sun rise. By the second morning, I stopped hurling invectives verbally and began writing my questions in a notebook. Some of what I wrote bordered on blasphemy. Yet there was a feeling of hard soundness about being honest. If there was a God, He would have to be truth. And in that case, candor—however impertinent—would be more pleasing to Him than posturing. Gradually the torment of my grief fell away. In its place was left a great wistfulness and a terrible aloneness.
I knew that Miss Alice sensed my isolation, yet she did not intrude. Then one morning on my way to my woodland room, as I reached the edge of her yard, I saw that she was up and saddling Goldie.
“You’re out early, Christy.” It was a half-question.
“Good morning, Miss Alice,” I parried, my eyes taking in the picture she made in her smart navy blue serge riding habit and soft leather boots. “Is it Big Lick or Cataleechie?”
“Big Lick this week.” She put out a hand to stroke the sorrel’s neck and Goldie responded by laying his head on her shoulder. I started to wish her a good week and walk on, but her intent look held me. “Christy, child, I’ve been noticing something.”
“Yes, Miss Alice?”
“Thee is in agony.”
“Yes.”
She was silent for what seemed like a long time. Still, her eyes held mine. “As some of the dear old Friends used to say, ‘I have a word of edification to build thee up.’ ” Her voice grew warm with feeling. “Christy, those who’ve never rebelled against God or at some point in their lives shaken their fists in the face of heaven, have never encountered God at all.”
“You mean it’s good to rebel?”
She smiled at me and then turned to adjust the girth and close the flaps of her saddlebags. “I mean that rebellion against our human lot and admitting that we don’t understand are clear steps on the way to finding reality.”
“But I don’t seem to be able to find anything.”
“Christy, did you ever read Job?”
“No.”
“Job rebelled too. Read him. And King David had his troubles too. He poured his misery out in poetry—the Psalms. It’s reading that I recommend for you right now.” She mounted and sat holding a loose rein, looking down at me, her eyes luminous and full of feeling. “How can I say it to thee? If I care about thee so much, He does too. And more, so much more.”
And she blew me a kiss and cantered off.
I felt better, not quite so lonely and lost. During the week that Miss Alice was away, I did open my Bible and there I found astonishing companionship. Other men and women long ago had asked the identical questions that I was asking. Miss Alice was right, that was what the book of Job in the Old Testament was all about. Job too had shaken his fist in the face of heaven as I had there on my hillside. It gave me a strange feeling to find that his words were my words too:
I will not refrain my mouth;
I will complain in the bitterness of my soul . . .
And I found
that Psalm after Psalm had been poured out in the same agony of spirit that I was feeling and set down by King David in naked, unashamed emotion:
All the night long . . . I water my couch with my tears . . .
Why standest thou afar off, O Lord?
Why hidest thou thyself in times of trouble?
Even my feeling that perhaps I wanted no part of this heaven, others had felt too and had written down:
Therefore they say unto God, Depart from us; for we desire not the knowledge of thy ways.
The words were like understanding hands reaching out for me across the centuries. Their cry and mine, those others whom I had never known in the flesh, was the cry of the vulnerable human heart. There was comfort in the knowledge of our common humanity.
Morning after morning I returned to my hillside room to reach out for the stillness as a thirsty man reaches for a cup of cold water. I had never experienced anything like this before: a silence so complete that it seemed palpable, sensate, an entity in itself.
Yet the quietness was no sterile emptiness. Those who craved oblivion could not have tolerated this. Or those who wanted to escape themselves would flee this. Perhaps if I could stretch out my hand and stop the clock of time or listen deeply enough, I would not then miss the gifts the silence held out. For now I knew that at the heart of the stillness there was food to feed upon, wisdom to accept humbly, satisfaction to be quaffed. Irresistibly the silence drew me because it promised that where there was hunger there would also be bread.
And slowly, almost imperceptibly, out of the stillness during that second week my answer started coming—only not in any way I had expected. No effort was made to answer my “why?” Instead, I began to know, incredibly, unmistakably, beyond reason and beyond doubting that I, Christy Huddleston, was loved—tenderly, totally. Love filled me, washed over me, flowed around me. I did not know what to do with love as strong as this. Back off from its intensity? Embrace it?
My tears flowed. I could not stop them.
Then the thought came: wasn’t this the confirmation for which I had asked? This love disclosing itself was no cosmic Creator of a mechanistic universe, for the revelation was intimate, personal. Perhaps the assurance always has to be personal, revealed to the inner person alone, since only man sees other men en masse, whereas God insists on seeing us one by one, each a special case, each inestimably beloved for himself.
The world around me was still full of riddles for which my little mind had not been given answers; David had been right about that. Nor could I know what the future held. But the fundamental doubt was for me silenced. I knew now: God is. I had found my center, my point of reference. Everything else I needed to know would follow.
That morning the sun came up in a blaze of glory.
Until typhoid fever came to Cutter Gap I had known little about the disease, only that it had a connection with polluted water and that sometimes the patient’s hair fell out. Now circumstances were forcing knowledge upon me. Ten days after Fairlight’s death, eight more persons had the fever: Rebecca Holt, a nephew of Uncle Bogg’s, and one of the children from our school, thirteen-year-old Bessie Coburn, with five additional cases reported across Raven Mountain.
The mountain people called typhoid “the summer scourge” because many a year as soon as warm weather brought thawing ground and flies, the fever would begin. But typhoid could just as truly have been tagged “the autumn scourge,” for it was the fall rains washing human and animal waste down the steep slopes into creeks and springs that, as often as not, started the epidemics.
People remembered those bad years: “That September Arlie took sick and died” . . . “And Verta and her baby—the babe was buried in her arms” . . . “Recollect ye that one day when six folks was lowered into their bury-holes?”
There was scarcely a family in the Cove that had not lost at least one child to the plague some year or other. The fever would leap from house to house. A case here, a case there. Terror in the hearts of the mothers, not knowing where the fever would strike next. Hardest to bear was not understanding what caused the sickness or how it spread. There were autumns when it seemed that no amount of effort on the part of doctors or those who nursed so patiently could stop the onward march of the virulent monster, nothing that is, except November’s sharply dropping temperatures that killed off the flies and froze the suppurating ground.
Only recently was the country at large beginning to accept the fact that typhoid was a disease of filth, though often not of the person affected. I had seen state health bulletins in Asheville and posters on courthouse walls heralding the news that the scourge could be prevented:
A Little Message To Post
on the Wall and to Remember:
TYPHOID FEVER
is a Wasteful, Dangerous Disease
That can be Prevented
By Care and Cleanliness
do your part!
The notice went on to explain that the fever was spread by a well person taking into his mouth human filth from a typhoid patient, the germs carried by something like fingers, flies, food, cooking utensils, bed linens or towels.
Miss Alice told me that in the summer of 1910, Lyleton had had an epidemic that had started in a family who lived at the head of a creek. Miles downstream, children playing in the same creek had come down with the disease. Sometimes the carrier turned out to be a person nursing a typhoid case who went directly from the sickroom to milk a cow or to pay a call.
Although Dr. MacNeill was hopeful that this year’s cases would not turn into an epidemic, already he was so rushed in trying to visit all the sick that it was no longer feasible for him to spend time going back and forth to his cabin. So we set up a cot for him in David’s quarters where he could stay whenever he liked.
Of an evening more and more frequently he would stop by the parlor, weary from his rounds, eager to relax and talk. To us he could speak with a frankness not possible elsewhere and thus unload some of the matters troubling him. I sensed an emotional base to his anxiety about this particular disease unusual in a physician and thought for the hundredth time about his young wife Margaret—Miss Alice’s daughter. As I had heard the story, some three months before their first baby had been due, Margaret had fallen ill with the fever. After battling for her life for three weeks, labor had started and the baby had been born prematurely. The baby son had lived only a few hours. The mother had died the next day.
Fingers now moving restlessly through his hair, the doctor told us, “What looks like beautiful, sparkling drinking water may contain billions of typhoid bacilli. That is, if the spring or creek from which the water is taken is at the bottom of a hill—as most of them are—with anything and everything washing into it.
“Yet here in the mountains, people are proud of their water. Crazy contradiction! Every family thinks their water is best—whether it’s limestone, freestone, sulphur, iron or just achingly cold.”
Talking seemed to release the tension pent inside him. He stretched his long legs out full length, took his pipe out of his mouth and waved it in the air. “I can hear them now: ‘Why, Doc, you’re plumb crazy. Ain’t no better water anywhars than the spring on our place. Hits bound to be pure. Bubbles right up out’n the ground.’ Or else when I question them, they’ll protest, ‘Why, Doc, I raised twelve young-uns on branch water. Hardly sick a day in their lives.’
“There are two keys to the situation: the ordinary housefly and the wrong kind of privies—or none at all. As you know, most families around here haven’t made any effort to deal with either problem.
“As for nursing the cases of typhoid we have already—trouble is, to pull most patients through, I’d have to own an Aladdin’s lamp to get the right conditions: a room to themselves, no visitors, continuous nursing, every mouthful of food controlled by the doctor.
“You’ve all seen it,” he went on. “Every last relative and friend has to visit the sick and the dying. The sicker the patient is, the more folks gather round. Nobody wan
ts to miss a deathbed scene. There’s always the outside chance that the dying might make a startling confession. And while they wait, the audience chats, sings, prays aloud, and moans.”
When he talked like that, I was reminded of my reaction to him that first afternoon in his cabin: the doctor seemed from the mountains, but not of them.
“Why, I’ve had patients who so enjoyed being the star of the performance that they proceeded to surprise everybody and get well.” He laughed at his own recollections. “Naturally, I always took full credit for the patient’s recovery.
“Well, anyway, enough of that. Many more cases and I’m going to have to yell for help. Guess I can send an SOS to Knoxville for some young medical student who wants to get experience. But I hope that won’t be necessary.
“It’s a good sign that the rest of the Spencer family have stayed healthy. By the way, Christy, when is school supposed to open?”
“October twenty-eighth—if you think it’s safe.”
“No use postponing school that I can see. I guess you understand that typhoid isn’t considered contagious in the sense of being airborne?”
I nodded.
“Your children will be as safe at school as they would be at home. Safer in fact, because the school’s cleaner.”
When Miss Alice agreed with the idea of going ahead with school, I was relieved. Now that we had such an assortment of boarders in the mission house, we needed the school routine to keep them busy and happy. Little Guy was staying on for a while longer to give Clara a better chance to adjust to her difficult new role as mistress of the Spencer household; Dr. MacNeill wanted Wanda Ann Beck with us so that he could watch and treat her eyes. He had written out a page of complicated instructions for us: cold compresses; the application of both nitrate of silver and copper sulphate once a day to the inside of her eyelids; Argyrol drops; scrupulous care to protect the other children. As soon as Wanda’s inflamed eyes were better, the doctor planned to operate to remove the worst of the granulations on her lids.
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