Hominy Creek was named by the first whites who rode into the valley, who surprised Cherokees making hominy on its banks. When the Cherokees fled, they threw corn and lye into the stream. Very close to where this allegedly happened, in the bottomland half a mile downhill from the church, the Sand Hill congregation built a rude structure from locust uprights and joists roofed with oak shakes. They called it Calvin’s Destination, and determined once a summer month to hike there to picnic after worship.
One such Sunday, after the meal, Jim waded into the sparkling creek. After a dry summer it was shallow, exposing enough rocks upon which Nell could walk with his assistance. The pair made their way slowly upstream, Nell falling against him, sometimes on purpose. Jim loved the feel of her hand in his, and the proximity of her body and perfume made him a little giddy.
They stopped mid-creek while he squatted to turn up rocks like a twelve-year-old. Actually he needed to smooth the bulge in his pants, but meantime flung a crawdad at Nell, who screamed, but not too loudly. They went on, he wading, she following on the rocks, until the playing children’s uproar was totally muffled by creek noise. They got out on the opposite bank, and, after Jim determined that no one had followed them, ensconced themselves behind a large boulder.
Fire in her eyes, she leaned back and sighed. “Jim, dear, it’s surely hot.”
When Jim put his arms around her, something speared her abdomen. “My,” she said, “what’s that?”
He kissed her. “It’s all yours,” he said, as they fumbled for openings in clothing. Quickly, in postlapsarian daylight, Nell enjoyed things about Jim that were not angular.
Elizabeth took to her bed for a week when she discovered Nell was pregnant. Then mother and daughter confronted Henry with the news. Henry bit a cigar in two. “You’re what?” he yelled.
“Now, Henry,” said Elizabeth, “you might as well calm down and make the best of this.”
“By God, I’ll shoot him for this.”
“Daddy, he’s my man,” said Nell.
“He done you wrong,” said Henry. “I’m a mind to—”
“Daddy, you’re going to have the finest grandson in the world,” she cooed, and after a few days Henry agreed maybe a son-in-law with a job and a little education might be, if not all right, at least bearable.
Elizabeth had emerged from what she called her boudoir with a plan. She invited Jim for dinner, shined the silver plate, polished the semi-porcelain, and folded her best cloth napkins into Lady Windermere’s fans. She served a standing rib roast garnished with rosemary. Nell baked potatoes and peppers stuffed with ham and bread crumbs, and took credit for yeast rolls, although Elizabeth had done most of that preparation.
“We’re dying to find out about you,” said Elizabeth to Jim over a bite of potatoes. “Tell us of your ancestors.”
Jim thought a second. “Ma’am, my daddy’s Mack Hawkins from Carter Fork. His daddy was Henry, died when I was a baby, on a hunting trip. I have no idea about his daddy’s name.”
Elizabeth laid fork on plate. “How about your mother?”
“She was Rhoda Mooney, from over in Cosby. Her daddy made liquor, they say. I never knew him. Killed in a wreck. Car left the road and plowed grille-first into a tree. That’s as far back as I can go on that side.”
Elizabeth arched her eyebrows. “I see,” she said, then smiled and swept the air with her hand. “We’re going to have to invent your family tree. Hawkins sounds like a lovely English name. So does Mooney, although maybe it was spelled Mauney in the old country. Oh, my, it can’t be Irish. No, certainly not. Surely you have knights in your pedigree.”
“Ma’am, if it’ll make you feel better, we can make some up.”
By dinner’s end Jim descended distaff-side from Welsh royalty and sword-side from King Henry the Fifth. A radiant Elizabeth poured coffee, which pleased Henry enough to ask Jim to retire to the porch for a cigar. Next day Elizabeth launched into wedding plans. It forever galled Elizabeth Johnson to announce her daughter’s engagement to a mere forester from Cataloochee, but Nell was “in trouble,” and there was no help for it.
The wedding was a simple affair in the chapel, bare save for one candle on the communion table and sprigs of boxwood in the windows. They had the reception, replete with a two-layer coconut cake, green punch, and fancy nuts, in the Sunday school building. No Queens attended. Elizabeth kept her head up until she came home, then took to her bed.
Just off the east-west highway north of an enormous bottom one hill west of Calvin’s Destination sat a settlement called Scratch Ankle, consisting of a general store, a two-story boardinghouse, and a Baptist church. Other than the fact that it was a flat spot about halfway between Asheville and Canton, there seemed no reason for it.
Jim hoped the name had nothing to do with biting insects. He and his bride settled into a two-room apartment in the boardinghouse. Jim worked with the forest service, and Nell, sharing Jim’s worry about fleas, scrubbed floors and walls. They enjoyed getting to know each other, and spent a merry Christmas Day with Nell’s parents in West Asheville.
In May of 1926, what Elizabeth called “the blessed event” and what Nell termed the product of the most hellish night of her life, arrived. They named him Henry Mack after his grandfathers. Elizabeth and Nell called him His Majesty. Remembering his mother’s jingles, Jim called him Little Mack Truck, but the boy did not inherit his father’s colicky disposition.
Jim received a postcard from his father in the summer of 1927. “Come see us,” it said, in a shaky scrawl. “Mama’s not herself.” Jim was as surprised at his father’s writing two sentences as he was to get the card. Back in Cataloochee, he found his mother wandering in their woodlot, not entirely with all her wits.
“Mama, it’s me,” he said.
She looked up toward her son’s face, recognition rising in her eyes like steam off a winter pond. “You home from school, Son?”
“Mama, I’m married now, remember? With a son?”
She nodded passively as he led her back to the house. Both his brothers were gone from home, but his sister, Rhoda, lived in Big Cataloochee, working in Lige and Penny Howell’s tourist business. Jim sat with both Rhodas and his father in the kitchen that weekend, and they decided little Rhoda would move home to take care of big Rhoda, who by then had decided she didn’t need anybody to take care of her.
“Jim,” said his sister in a private moment on the porch, “if she gets to wandering off all the time, I don’t know what I’ll do. I have my own life, you know.”
“I know, Tater Bug. But I can’t do it. We’re counting on you.”
“Damn you, don’t call me Tater Bug.”
Jim left on Sunday full of no particular optimism.
When the park came in the fall of 1928, it was, as they say, “a blessing.” Jim helped his parents settle with the park commission and move to Maggie Valley. Rhoda Senior soon had a four-room one-story house veneered to the windowsills with creek rocks. Jim bought her a Sears vacuum cleaner, two dollars down, three dollars a month. Fascinated with it, she cleaned house every day, forgetting to wander. Mack, who had a little money for the first time in his life, paid a neighbor girl to stay with Rhoda while he “loafered” at the barber shop, telling tall tales. His favorite was about a prodigious night of coon hunting, during which they treed so many they had to go for a mule and sled to dray them home.
Having settled Mack and Rhoda, Jim visited the park commission, in those days upstairs in Asheville’s brand-new 1928-model city hall. Everything in Asheville looked too new to him—the green and pink tiled cafeteria, the skinny, fragile Jackson Building, and the Baptist church’s outlandish Florentine dome. The old courthouse—built in 1903 and, to Jim’s eye, perfectly fine—had not yet been torn down in favor of the new gray classical courthouse, beside which a brand-new city hall sat like a painted woman. He walked inside its cavernous entrance and looked into the gloom. A black man in a white uniform materialized. “Going up, sir?”
Except f
or some hands at the feed and seed, Jim had never talked to a black man. But this person seemed friendly and cordial. “Park commission,” said Jim.
“Fifth floor, sir. Watch your step.”
Jim rode his first elevator behind the brass scissor-fold doors. The receptionist took his application and gave him a written test and some encouragement. A month later Jim heard from Red Pendleton, telling him to report for an interview for a position as Cataloochee interim warden. He was so far the only applicant, and, since he knew the territory, he was an attractive candidate. Assuming he landed the job, when the park superintendent was named, Jim would be in the running for a permanent position.
Nell had seldom been outside Buncombe County except on occasional trips to Spartanburg, the ancestral seat of the Crumps. She had never been to Haywood County. When Jim showed her the letter, she hugged him. “Congratulations, honey,” she said. “Are we going to be happy there?”
“You bet,” he said. “It’ll be a fine place to raise the kids. Away from all this infernal construction.”
“Kids?”
He grinned. “I thought we were talking about another one.” He rubbed her shoulder.
“Is there a school?”
“Right now, yes. Teacher and everything.”
“Where will we live?”
“I’d guess in Lige Howell’s old house. It’s really big, a fine place. You’ll see.”
“What’s it really like there?”
“Paradise, honey. Pure paradise. You’ll love it.” He patted her on the bottom.
She giggled, cleared her throat, and sang: “‘At the lemonade springs where the bluebird sings, in the Big Rock Candy Mountains!’ That it?”
“Pretty close, darling. Pretty close.” He took down his fiddle and played an intro. They harmonized Haywire Mac’s version, ending with “I’ll see you all this coming fall in the Big Rock Candy Mountains!” When he hung up the fiddle, she danced her beau into the bedroom.
CHAPTER 8
Bird in the Hand
“Old gal, you ready?” As Silas smoothed Maude’s glossy mane, she snorted and stamped her rear off hoof. “I’ll take that for yes,” he said, tightening the cinch. “We got a fur piece to go.”
Silas wore a black suit, a broad-brimmed hat to match, and a collarless white shirt buttoned at the throat. Although he owned one necktie, he never wore it. His late wife had made it when they were newlyweds. He had thanked her, told her he was not prone to such frippery, and tucked it into a dresser drawer. They had never spoken of it again.
He led Maude from the barn and mounted. “Saddle’s been so long between me and you it don’t squeak anymore,” he said, and smiled. They journeyed early enough to pass Mary Carter’s darkened farmhouse without being hailed. Likewise, no wood smoke ascended from the schoolhouse chimney—and the churchyard was quiet in the gray late October morning. Seeing Nellie’s general store’s door yawning open, he stopped. He tied his horse and climbed the two creaking steps. “Nelse, what are you doing this early?”
Nelse, Lige Howell’s first cousin, a widower, was a saturnine man. “Couldn’t sleep. Might as well come over and dust the shelves. You know, I could ask you the same.”
“I’m off to town. Thinking about suing the park.”
“I’d sue the britches off them, except I don’t own but just that patch I make a garden on. Take them to the cleaners.”
Silas looked around the store. Between a bolt of cotton chintz and a row of Borax boxes lay a tray of small, round lightbulbs. “What’s these for?” he asked, examining one as if it came from Madagascar.
“Auto bulb, Silas. There’s enough cars in the valley now to stock some. You ever going to buy an automobile?”
“Hell, no. If I can’t get there by foot or on Maude, I don’t need to go.” He put the bulb down. “It’s not that I’ve got anything against them—I just got no use for them.” He wandered to a pile of blankets with eyelets stitched in their corners. “What about these?”
“Camp blankets. When the park comes, we’ll have a bunch of campers.”
“Nelse,” said Silas, “I haven’t left a perfectly good, warm bed to sleep outside in years. Now you’re telling me people are stupid enough to sleep outside when they don’t have to. I guess I don’t belong in this modern world.”
“Sometimes I don’t think I do, either. In fact, I know I don’t.”
Silas looked over his neighbor, a paunchy man of seventy-odd years, as though for the first time. “Nelse, how come you made a storekeep?”
He laughed. “Too old to go to the war. Didn’t want to be a preacher. Too lazy to be a ditchdigger. Never was handy at anything. My daddy always said if he locked me in a room with nothing in it but an anvil, I’d find a way to break it. So when this came along, I stepped into it, and I been here ever since.”
Silas chuckled. “Well, give me two tins of sardines and a pack of crackers before you bust them, or your head, one. I’ll need a snack this morning.”
Past the Bennett turn Silas gently coaxed Maude into a faster pace. “Come on, gal, or we’ll never get there.” From the valley floor to the top of the mountain, farms were smaller and more numerous. Most houses were set back from the big road. He saw one farmer turning rye under for the winter, another snaking a firewood tree, a woman harvesting greens. Getting ready for what Old Man Winter would bring. Judging from the size of people’s woodpiles, he meant it to be a hard one.
At the gap Silas rested the mare and ate his snack. This high, leaves had cascaded. Bare limbs featured angles and notches and boles invisible in midsummer. A bear had rooted the base of a fair-size oak, trying to topple it in search of underground grubs. Silas finished one tin of sardines, wiped the oil out with a leaf, stomped the tin flat, and laid it in a saddlebag. They made fine roof patches. He lit his pipe. “Old gal, we better get going.”
Up Jonathan’s Creek, motorcars were as thick as mites on a banty rooster, and Maude became skittish. Silas had never seen so many cars in one place as in Dellwood, so he led her through the intersection. Horns blew, and several times he was jeered by young drivers, one of whom yelled “Go back to the county home.” At Barberville he led the horse into the parking lot of a dry goods store. A man wearing sleeve garters swept the porch. “Friend, where are you headed?”
“Town,” said Silas. “But she don’t much want to go.”
“Don’t blame her. Tell you what. There’s a stable behind the store. She can stay there if you want to catch a ride. Take her to town, you’re liable to get a ticket.”
“For what?”
“They don’t cotton to manure in the street.”
Ten minutes later he put out his thumb for the first time in his life, and quickly caught a ride to Main Street. He said little, preferring to concentrate on how to exit the vehicle if the driver, who seemed bent on making a land speed record, slowed enough to allow it.
He didn’t know any lawyers save Oliver Babcock, who, he had to admit, had somewhat changed his inherited opinions. Silas’s father had maintained that attorneys at their best were but carrion crows out to pick every bit of flesh from their clients. Silas saw a shingle on the left-hand side of the street advertising James Smathers, Esq. An old family name in Haywood and, for the most part, respected.
He tried the doorknob and walked into the reception area. How many cattle gave their lives to cover this furniture? A bookcase with glass doors held leather-bound volumes, and dull brass spittoons, ashtrays, and umbrella stands littered the floor. The room smelled of something Silas could not quite put a finger on—wealth and revenge, fear and outrage, tempered by very little mercy and justice.
“Sir, may we help you?” sang a pleasant voice from behind a partition. Silas looked over the black counter at a young woman, pretty enough to win a county fair ribbon. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and removed his hat. “I’d like to see Lawyer Smathers.”
“What is your name, sir?”
“Wright. Silas Wright.”
“Mr.
Wright, I’ll tell Mr. Smathers you’re here. Would you like some coffee?”
“No, ma’am. I’m fine.”
Alone, he looked over Smathers’s certificate of admission to the bar. Below it hung framed pictures, one of Chapel Hill’s Old Well, another of some fancy building sprouting corn, wheat, and he didn’t know what all from its columns.
Smathers, a short curly-haired man with bushy eyebrows and rolled-up sleeves, appeared, hand extended. “Mr. Wright, a pleasure. You like the photos, sir?”
Silas shook Smathers’s hand. “Yep. I’ve seen the well before, but what’s this? The agriculture school?”
Smathers laughed. “Playmaker’s Theatre. I was an actor there. Those columns, by the way, are wooden.”
“Could have fooled me. I bet being an actor comes in handy in court.”
“It does, sir. Come in and have a seat.”
Silas sat before a desk with so many layers of paper obscuring its top it could have been made of acacia for all anyone could tell. Its side panels were cherry, its hardware was shiny brass, and its owner was a man who liked a good cigar. “Smoke?” asked Smathers, opening a humidor in Silas’s direction.
Silas plucked his pipe from his pocket. “Thanks, but I’ll stick with this.”
Smathers lit a cigar and sat back. “Mr. Wright, it’s a pleasure to meet you. I believe my father and you went hunting one time.”
Silas noticed a patch of weeping bumps on the lawyer’s left forearm, evidence he’d brushed poison oak recently. “Then you must be Joe Smathers’s boy. Me and him had us a time one weekend. You couldn’t have been much more than a pup.”
“I was four. I was scared to death when they took me to the hospital to see Daddy.”
“Well, he sure didn’t bargain for that old boar to run him over. Them things’ tushes are like razors.”
“How did it happen?”
“Your father came to Cataloochee to boar hunt. He’d killed bear and deer and even been out West for caribou and elk. But he’d never killed a wild hog. We hunted the better part of a Saturday, saw sign but no hogs anywhere. About halfway up toward Davidson Gap, where the springs seep the switchbacks, the dogs raised something in a big old laurel hell.
Requiem by Fire Page 7