Farewell, I'm Bound to Leave You

by Fred Chappell

  Now I understand, I thought. This journey was for me to come here to this cabin and let these sounds come upon me. I can’t figure them out by myself. The Wind Woman will teach me how to lay out these sounds in proper fashion. I will wait here for her to come and beg the favor of her aid. I will wait here as long as it takes.

  And that is the last sight I have of myself at that time—sitting alone in the cabin up on Wind Mountain with my eyes closed and patient to consort the sounds of the hollers and slopes and valleys below into music.

  THE MADWOMAN

  When my mother remarked how I must have noticed that our aunt Samantha was a free-talking woman, I said yessum and no more than that. Aunt Sam’s colorful speech was one of my keenest youthful delights and I didn’t wish to say anything that might hint disapproval—or approval, for that matter. If my mother realized how sweet it deep down tickled me to hear Aunt Sam declare that Preacher Andy Garvin had less true religion than a rooster fart or describe Lem Turley as being so short that his face cheeks were not well divided from his ass cheeks, she might find some way to shut off that source of pleasure. But probably not. We all stood in awe of Aunt Sam and would as soon tell the rising sun its proper business as advise her on the social graces.

  She was a famous mountain musician. She played a fiddle that could tear your heart out and then with another tune give you a brand-new and more joyous one. She could play other instruments, too, guitar and piano and maybe a little banjo, and she could sing lead or harmony in her burgundy contralto voice in such a way, you felt she was stroking your cheek with a velvet glove. She was to be heard fairly regular on the “Grand Ole Opry”—though my grandmother never allowed us to listen to that program—and she traveled all around the South with her band, the Briar Rose Ramblers, playing high schools and armories and in between baseball doubleheaders and county fairs, you name it. Anywhere she went, she was as welcome as August rain.

  “That’s how she got into the habit of strong language,” my mother explained. “She was traveling with a bunch of male musicians before she was married and while she was married and after she was widowed. That is a situation uneasy for a woman and Aunt Sam decided she might protect herself by being one of the boys. If they thought of her as one of themselves, they wouldn’t be trying to take advantage of her as a female. So she spoke as they did.”

  “How did it work out?” I asked.

  We were climbing the steep grade of the mountain just this side of Betsey’s Gap and my mother took her eye off the road for a brief moment to glance at me. “I think it worked splendidly,” she replied. “She has as upstanding a name as any church organist or sewing circle leader. Nobody holds her lightly and nobody talks trash about her.”

  “Then it’s a smart thing to do,” I said.

  “Well, yes. But it gets to be a habit and sometimes she forgets who she’s talking to, and that can be awkward. Or sometimes she’ll say something just for devilment. Like when she told her bass player’s wife how she felt right sorry for her.”

  “Why did she say that?” I asked, and watched my mother’s face turn a dark mottled red.

  “Because—” She was trying so hard not to laugh that she choked on her sentence and tears streaked her cheek.

  “Watch out,” I said as she veered toward the ditch. Luckily, we were at the top now and there was a wide-out, and she pulled into it and tried to regain control.

  But the story was too powerful in her and she had to finish. “She said she was sorry for Marilou. Her husband’s pecker had to be awful scrawny, she said, because that’s where he kept his brains.” She reached a Kleenex out of the pocket of her gray cotton sweater and blotted her face and breathed deep and we started off again.

  * * *

  Going down the mountain, she told me about when Aunt Sam was young. “It is a sad story,” my mother said, “and you will remember that Aunt Sam never needed more sadness in her life. If there is an ordeal she has not endured, I would flinch to know its name. But it is a sweet story, too, because Aunt Sam is a sweet woman and found herself doing what not another person could do. It was too much for her, if the truth be known, because at that time she was just about the age you are right now.

  “It was Aunt Chancy Gudger who needed her. Aunt Chancy had lost her mind and there was not much way to help her. Her brother Willie lived across the county in a little house on Chambers Mountain and he made sure to look in on her when he could and tried to get her to move in with his family, but she was not to be budged. She was a part of her cabin like its roof, she said. Her sister Amy had got married by then and lived down on Sawney Creek but wouldn’t have anything to do with Chancy. She had abandoned her; everybody figured there must have been terrible bad blood between them, but Amy laid the blame on her husband. Benjamin just wouldn’t put up with Aunt Chancy, she said—though nobody had ever heard him say a word against his sister-in-law. Of course, he was as closemouthed as a miser’s purse snap and never would have spoken his mind except in his own backyard in the dark of night.

  “Aunt Chancy wasn’t dangerous to herself or anyone else. That’s what everybody thought at least. And she could still look after herself pretty well, cook and sweep and keep her body halfway clean—except for her hair, which was a mess. You, being of the he-male gender, wouldn’t know how that’s a sign you look for in a woman. If she doesn’t keep her hair shining and brushed and combed and put up, then she is suffering in her mind. Aunt Chancy could boast a full glory of honey red hair when she was a young woman and then long after that when she was married, but when her husband was gone, her hair turned a streaky white-and-gray color and she clapped her husband’s ugly black shapeless felt hat on her head and that was that. She was never to be seen without that big black hat on her head. It became the living signal of what she was, the way a coon’s mask tells what it is and a possum’s pouch does.

  “She talked, though, without ever stopping. Most of it was only nonsense, unconnected sentences or sometimes strings of words that didn’t hook up or sounds only a little bit like words. She would howl, too. When the moon came sailing up behind Twichell and flooded down on her cabin there by Herndon Creek, she would howl like a soul lost to man and God. You could hear it on the mountain and in the hollers and some claimed they could hear it yonder in the valley. Away away … away … away … Well, I can’t make the kind of sound she made and I expect nobody else can unless they’re undergoing the secret burning sorrow Aunt Chancy endured. It was a howl that made you hold your breath as long as you could and your skin would go hard and cold on your forearms.

  “I’ve said she was possessed of a secret sorrow, because that is what we all supposed about her. She was always a strong-minded woman before she lost her reason, as strong-willed as her husband. Uncle Dave was a willful man and a mean one, according to some report, but he wasn’t cruel to Aunt Chancy, because she wouldn’t put up with it. She said to your grandmother once that as long as Colt made pistols, there wouldn’t be a man to beat on her, and it surprised your grandmother to hear a woman talk in such a violent manner and she never forgot Aunt Chancy’s saying it.

  “So she had a forceful steady mind and then she lost her steadiness. Or rather, her mind divided up into different parts. When you were little, you used to play at damming the small creek beside the house at the foot of the hill, the one your daddy built his famous bridge over. The water will flow right along in its channel, but when you choke it up with rocks and mud and sticks the way you used to do, it spills over the banks and takes a lot of different little courses, running every which way. That was what it was like with Aunt Chancy. Something had blocked the natural channel of her mind and now it wandered in runlets to no purpose.

  “But her willpower was still strong. It was strong to begin with and it got stronger during all those years with Uncle Dave. It must have been a struggle every hour of every day between those two and it toughened her spirit the way grubbing stumps and breaking new ground make the menfolk tougher. And meaner, too
, sometimes, you might notice, and that might be the case also with Aunt Chancy. When her mind was ill and they wanted her to move, she wouldn’t. She told her son she wouldn’t and her daughter and her friends and neighbors and even the preacher from Herndon Forks Baptist.… Well, to tell the truth, she’d never put much stock in preachers; she was kind of like your daddy in that respect.

  “It was a rough situation. She kept house the best she could, I expect, but it surely was not spotless. And she would have all sorts of queer things about, dead mice and possum skulls she would find in the woods. Snakeskins and so forth. The kind of things you might think witches used in the olden times, and of course there were some folks who said she was a witch. That talk made your daddy spittin’ mad. ‘Witches!’ he would say. ‘This is the twentieth century. You have to work at it twenty-four hours a day to be so ignorant.’

  “Anyway, Aunt Chancy was no witch. She was just a poor old woman whose wits had strayed and she was trying to find her way in the darkness of her mind and keep her independence. But it was a sore trial to hear her talk and howl. One time your grandmother went to visit her and came back so troubled and unhappy, she had to lie down. That set us to worrying about her, it was so unlike. For days afterward, Aunt Chancy stayed on her mind and she tried to think and pray a way to help. She spent long hours with her Bible and in the Book of Samuel she found her plan.

  “You know the story of King Saul and David, how the king was troubled by an evil spirit and was advised to seek out a man who was a cunning player on the harp. So he searched and heard about a shepherd whose name was David, the son of Jesse, and he sent for him to come. Then always afterward when the evil spirit was upon Saul, David took up his harp and played it with his hand so that Saul’s spirit was refreshed and the evil spirit departed from him. You know this story; I’m sure your grandmother has told it to you, and maybe when you were little she paid you a nickle to read it yourself and tell it back to her.

  “Anyway, that was the notion that came to her—for Sam to go to Aunt Chancy and play the prettiest music she knew and see if her bad thoughts would go away. It took a while to arrange, but Samantha had no fear of Aunt Chancy and was as willing to go as if she was going to eat supper with one of her many beaux in that cabin on Twichell. She took her second-best fiddle with her and her guitar, too, and planned on staying as many days as Aunt Chancy would allow.

  “And so she did. But I have to tell you, Jess, it must have been a harsh and discouraging ordeal, for there were bleak hours when Aunt Chancy’s mind would run to filth, the kind of words and thoughts it would make a grown man heartsick to hear, much less a ladylike young girl like our aunt Sam. And then there was the moonlight howling that made your blood run ice. But Samantha would take up her fiddle and her bow and play a sweet slow waltz or an old-time ballad like ‘The Salley Garden.’

  “Down in the salley garden

  My love and I did meet—

  “Well, I’m no singer; you know that. But Samantha could sing. Her voice was pitched higher than it is now, and she could make it clear and light when she wanted to or give it that lonesome drone that carries so strong. Sometimes she would have to sing for a pretty long time, all through two or three songs, before Aunt Chancy could seem to hear her. But when she did listen at last, she would grow quiet and her face would gentle and her hands would stop their sawing motions and she would look at Sam with a smile of pleasure.

  “One thing Samantha learned was that she couldn’t rely on her music too often. The distress that was in Aunt Chancy had to find an outlet and run some of its course. It was like steam building up in a pressure cooker; if some of it didn’t leak out, there would be worse trouble. So Sam had to let her go on for a while in that terrible way, and when Aunt Chancy slacked off a bit, why, then she could take up her guitar and begin singing softly, as if she was trying not to attract any notice at all, and then gradually sing a little louder and pick out, and after a while Aunt Chancy would loosen and close her eyes and hum along. She wasn’t able to carry a tune, but she could hum along, and Aunt Sam described the sound they made together as a strange wild harmony that only the moon could understand.

  “She only made one mistake, Samantha told me, and it was almost a fatal one. She had heard a song she liked that was new to her and she was teaching herself how to play it. Of course, it wasn’t really new; it was an old song that came from out west somewhere, but it was new to Sam. I’m sure you’ve heard it many times. They call it ‘Oh Shenandoah.’

  “Oh Shenandoah, I love your daughter

  All away, you rolling river—

  “See. I told you I’m no singer, and I don’t need to embarrass myself by constantly proving the fact.

  “Anyway, Aunt Sam started playing that song, faltering a little with the chords. When she sang the words, she didn’t start at the beginning, but picked up at the last verse.

  “And so farewell, I’m bound to leave you,

  All away, you rolling river,

  I’ll be gone when dawn is breaking,

  Away away,

  I’m bound away

  All across the wide Missouri.

  “And when she sang those words—not really singing, but sort of half-singing—Aunt Chancy gave a howl such as had never been heard upon this earth before and she came at Samantha with black murder in her face. If she’d had a weapon handy, it might have been the last hour Sam had seen. She cried out against her to stop. ‘It’s me, it’s Samantha,’ she said—because she could tell by Aunt Chancy’s eyes that she wasn’t seeing her, no more than a blind beggar could see her. She was only seeing into her own mind and nothing outside. And for a miracle, Aunt Chancy heard her and did stop, not more than a yard away and with her right hand quit from its strange sawing motion that always occupied it and raised to strike. Then her mouth worked and spit dribbled out and she said in a voice that frightened Sam down to the soles of her feet, a voice that was piteous and hurt and broken, but mean and vicious, too, and full of bloodlust, ‘Where’s my Frawley, what have you done with my Frawley, where’s my Frawley at, what you have done, what have you ever done?’

  “They stood like that a long time, Jess. Samantha was so full of terror, she couldn’t move, and Aunt Chancy was seeing a devil from hell before her and was willing to kill. Then the spell broke and they both stepped back. Samantha could feel the hot sweat on her brow and Aunt Chancy reached down and brought up her dirty old blue apron and covered her face with it, she was so brimful of shame. She turned away and ran into the bedroom, with her face still covered, and shut the door. But Sam could hear her weeping, weeping and weeping, and she stood there in the front room, she said, and looked at that door like it was trying to tell her something, she was that dumbfounded.”

  * * *

  “She knew who Frawley was, you see. All the women did. He was Uncle Burton Harper’s third son, who left our part of the world when he was a lad of sixteen or so and went to follow a romantic life all around the globe. He had been to far countries and strange climates and, to hear him tell it, had pursued many a thrilling adventure. He was a man of about twenty-five now, turned dark by tropical suns and seas, and with thick curly black hair. He sported a handsome black mustache, too, and an easy teasing manner that set the girls aflutter.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this, but it’s the truth, Jess, that he caught the fancy of your grandmother.”

  “Grandmother Sorrells?” I asked.

  My mother nodded slowly, careful to keep her eyes on the gravel road that was winding us down into the valley.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Well, I don’t know how to make it plainer.”

  “But wasn’t she married to Grandaddy already? She must’ve been.”

  “Indeed she was. In fact, I was fourteen years old then and had girlish thoughts of Frawley Harper myself.”

  “But if Grandmother was married—”

  “Jess, they don’t poke your eyes out when you recite the wedding vows. And
there was nothing to it. She was just sweet on a young man fifteen years her junior. Your grandaddy had to be gone away on his building jobs so much of the time, she was bound to get a little lonesome for romantic company. But there was never a word or a glance that passed between them, I can assure you of that. Frawley wouldn’t ever have had the least inkling of her sentiments. Which she recognized as foolishness anyway. She only had a sweet thought now and again and that was all it amounted to.”

  “I don’t understand—” I began.

  She gave me a sharp look. “Well, it’s about time you started to understand. You’re old enough. People have hidden desires, most of them passing desires that don’t come to anything because they don’t want them to. You have them yourself and I know what they are. If I wanted to make you squirm, all I’d have to do is mention them out loud.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  She smiled her sly and knowing smile, the one I dreaded most. “Sarah Robinson is what I’m talking about,” she said.

  My hands clenched and I felt my face go hot and I looked out the car window into the red clay road bank, where some hopeful sassafras bushes had got a toehold. It was one of those passionate instants when I wanted to kill all grown-ups, starting with my mother. I could see them in my mind, an endless plain of grotesquely twitching adult corpses, their headless necks gushing blood in torrents. “What do you mean?” I asked, my voice taut.

  “You’re crazy about that cute little Sarah Robinson and it just burns you up to hear me say so out loud.”

  “And I suppose you’re going to go on and on about it.”

  “I was only trying to explain,” she said. “My mother was just a tiny bit sweet on Frawley Harper and I was moony about him, and all the other girls and women looked at that fellow like he was a stick of peppermint candy with a magnificent black mustache.”

  The picture she conjured made me giggle.

  “There, you see. You’re laughing at me now and laughing at yourself, too. It’s just natural for males and females to be attracted to one another. Now and then there’s a man whose attractions are nigh onto supernatural. But any girl with an ounce of modesty will keep her feelings to herself and would rather die than let her thoughts be known. Of course, some girls don’t have an ounce of modesty. I won’t mention any names. I certainly won’t mention Rhonda Hollings; that name will never pass my lips.”