Toward the bottom of the mountain things looked more normal, because Old Man Bennett junior—the son of the original Old Man Bennett, whose house was burned during the Civil War and rebuilt by his namesake son—had so far been too stubborn to leave. His place in the curve of the road was kempt.
They forded the creek around four in the afternoon and turned sharply left. In a quarter mile Jim pulled beside a darkened house and parked. The Chevrolet backfired and dieseled to a stop. Doors creaked as the passengers emerged. The metallic thud of closing doors echoed off the barn.
Jim had never seen Lige Howell’s house without occupants or chimney smoke. The right-hand wing had been a stand-alone cabin, converted to a kitchen for Lige and Penny’s boarding business. In the gloom it looked tiny and cold. Across the dogtrot the squat two-story frame addition paled against the drooping sky. Elizabeth, raised a Baptist, thought it as cold as that hymn about Greenland’s icy mountains. She laid the back of her wrist to her forehead, said “Lord save us,” and fainted. Nell, having seen her mother swoon many a time, had to smile despite her own misgivings. Henry sat his wife on the edge of the truck seat and fanned with his handkerchief. “Son, what in the world?”
“It’s fine,” he said. “I’ll just go in and build a fire or two.”
A stack of stove wood and a box of kindling waited in the kitchen wing. He fired the cookstove and two coal oil lamps, and gathered his family into the room. Mack thought this a great adventure, and his face glowed in the lamplight. His mother and grandparents hovered in doubtful shadows. “It’ll be fine in a few minutes,” Jim said. “Meantime I’ll build the bedroom fires.”
As he started out the door, Henry grabbed his arm. “Do you mean we’re sleeping here?”
Jim looked at his father-in-law’s hand like it was a small, gnawing animal. “Yes, sir. It’ll be fine when we get some fire.”
“If you think Elizabeth will spend a night here, you have another think coming. This place doesn’t have electricity.”
Elizabeth, recovered from her swoon, paced like a trapped cat. Jim started toward the dogtrot, but she intervened. “You are crazy, Jim Hawkins. My daughter won’t stand for this.” She grabbed Henry’s sleeve. “Take us back. I demand it.”
“Elizabeth, calm down. I will get you all back home, but I have to have something to eat.”
Jim raised his hands. “If you’ll let me get us heat and light, this place will be snug in less than an hour. We can eat, unload the truck, and it’ll look a lot better in the morning.”
A mouse, flushed out of a nest in the oven, skittered along a baseboard and under the back door. Elizabeth shrieked loudly enough to break window glass. “Kill that THING,” she cried into Henry’s jacket. Her hat crashed to the floor.
“Dear, it’s gone.”
“I’m not spending another minute here! Next thing, we’ll see a snake.”
“Snakes are underground this time of year,” said Jim.
This only gave Elizabeth visions of snake heads peeking through floorboards. “Henry, pick up my hat. Nell Marie Johnson, get that little boy’s coat on. You and Henry Mack are coming home, where you belong.”
“Now, just a minute,” started Jim.
“Son,” said Henry, “she’s right. We’re going back.”
“Will you at least help me unload the truck?”
Henry said nothing as Nell looked out the window, choking back tears. Jim put his hand on her shoulder. “Honey, what do you say?”
She wept on his shoulder. Mack started crying because of his mother’s tears, and Elizabeth followed suit. Jim held Nell, wondering if this night might be the end of his marriage. “What do you want me to say?” she asked. “You said it would be perfect, but it isn’t, Jim. It really isn’t.”
“We can make it perfect,” he said quietly. “We have to. For Mack and our new one.”
“What’s that?” shouted Elizabeth. “New one?”
Nell hugged her mother. “I wasn’t going to tell yet. It’s too early. But, yes, I’m expecting.”
“That settles it. Nell Marie, you were foolish to even have thought of coming here.” She pointed a bony finger at Jim. “I am surprised at you, putting yourself ahead of the welfare of these sweet people, one of which is unborn. To think!”
Nell clutched Jim’s arm. “Mother, we made this decision together.”
“Nonsense. He surely browbeat you into this.”
“No, Mother. It wasn’t like that at all.” She dried her eyes and smiled at Jim. “We are going to be fine.” She took a deep breath and faced her father. “Daddy, help us get our things off the truck. Mack and I belong with Jim.” She hugged her husband.
“Well, I never,” said Elizabeth. “We’ll see how long this lasts. Henry, help them, quickly. I have to go home, and I don’t care if it’s dawn when we return. I will not sleep in a pigsty.” She looked at her feet as if a boa constrictor were about to engulf her.
Unloading took a scant ten minutes. They didn’t even break the punch set. Jim, Nell, and Mack stood on the porch beside their worldly goods and waved at Henry and Elizabeth as they backed into the road. Henry shoved in the clutch as Elizabeth rolled the window down. “Nell, please come home!”
“I am home, Mother,” she said. “At least for now. I’m sorry you feel this way.”
Jim’s heart felt as heavy as a glass paperweight as he watched Elizabeth roll up the window and gesture to Henry, who slammed the truck into granny gear and headed toward the ford. Jim and Nell watched their taillights, put Mack to bed, and then turned into the kitchen to heat ham and beans and hope they had chosen well.
CHAPTER 11
Flying Squirrel
Nell’s children were napping, so Nell sat at the kitchen table, left leg crossed under the right, and opened her mother’s envelope with a pewter letter opener. It was the only manufactured letter opener in Cataloochee—pocketknives, tenpenny nails, and fingers having always been sufficient. She liked both its heft and delicate engraving, reminiscent of muscadine vines. It was a going-away present from her mother, who had made Nell promise to write often and answer each of her letters.
Her mother wrote every Sunday. The letters usually arrived Wednesday morning, and Jim brought them home at dinnertime when he was working in the valley, that night or the next day when he was not. Nell’s mother perfumed her stationery box with a lavender sachet. When she remembered something after she had sealed a letter, she wrote it in pig latin on the flap, but there was no message there today.
Nell slit the envelope and removed the letter, written in her mother’s perfect penmanship. Elizabeth used vellum or onionskin under which she laid ruled paper so her lines did not slant or vary in spacing. A scan told Nell how her mother was feeling. Normally there would be several words in all capitals, some in italics, some underlined once and occasionally twice. If she were down, there would be fewer flourishes, but if manic, every other word might shout.
November 17, 1929
My Dearest Nell,
I DO hope you are well and that awful climate there is not WEIGHING you down. You know, you are like me, of a delicate sensibility, so be very conscientious to always feed that with pretty flowers, nice stories, and good companions. We must stick together, we women of refinement.
How are our precious children? It was so good to see them when you last brought them over. I think Little Elizabeth looks exactly like me when I was that age. She has my coloration and, I might add, temperament—treat her gently, Nell, do not chastise her with a switch or any awful and barbaric punishments. Henry Mack, I’m afraid, is the image of his father, but with time should OUTGROW that. Your brother Charles looked like his father for the longest time, but he finally (and happily) came to look like—Charles.
Church was simply horrible this morning. Pastor King has taken it upon himself to smugly speak about politics, but my opinion is that the church should stay out of such matters. What happens in New York, or in Washington, seems to me to have nothing to do with o
ur little Presbyterian church. We have enough trouble keeping our own little church house in order.
Mrs. Queen, Mrs. Arrowood, and Mrs. Hughey will be here tomorrow for bridge. You don’t remember when Monday was washday. My mother washed clothes, by hand, every Monday, come—as they say—the D—l or high water. Delicate though I was, I would have to help, but now I am glad I play bridge Mondays. We are fortunate to have an automatic washing machine. I wish you would come back so you won’t have to bear such a “COUNTRY” schedule. Your hands were always so pretty and soft, like mine are now.
THANKSGIVING will be the 28th. I must insist you and James bring my Grandchildren home so I can see them. I intend to cook a feast, and you and I can finish the kitchen preparations while your father and James play with the children. We girls can TALK.
I will close. Let me repeat what I said when your father and I left you in that horrible place. YOU MUST FIND A WAY OUT OF THERE SOON. No good can come from living in such a primitive backwater. I know you Love your Husband and want to stay with him. He will, as they all do, bring up your DUTY to him. But it seems to your poor mother your DUTY is to your Children (and me). There are WAYS, my dear, to really make him come around, to get him to clearly realize your happiness is more important than his silly job. If you know what I mean. If nothing else, I cannot continue to cruelly be deprived of seeing my grandchildren as I alas currently am.
Your Affectionate Mother
P.S. This silly situation with the stock market should blow over in a few days so do not worry about it.
P.P.S. Kiss my little ones and remind them they have a GRANDMOTHER!!!!
Nell looked at her hands. The tops of her knuckles were red and cracked, and her palms were callused from mop and broom. Nell had a tin of Watkins red clover salve, but her hands seemed endless in their capacity to soak it up. She rubbed the back of her left with her right and pursed her lips. Little Elizabeth cried.
Nell carried the letter into the pantry and put it into her stationery box, promising herself to answer it soon. She nearly slipped on Mack’s wooden truck in the front room, sending it crashing into the wall. Little Elizabeth stood squalling in her crib in the next room.
“Honey, here I am.” Her daughter was not yet a year old and was thoroughly wet. Nell comforted her and changed her diaper, wrinkling her nose as she dropped it into the bucket. “Now, then,” she said, “let’s go see what we can do this afternoon.”
They played awhile with a set of wooden blocks painted with letters and numbers, then Nell put Little Elizabeth in her crib and swept the floor in that room. They moved to the kitchen, where Nell laid paper and kindling in the cookstove. She had not yet mastered the art of keeping fire. She was hot-natured, so did not like a daytime fire, and because her parents had gotten electricity when she was seven or eight, she had never learned to keep a fire all day. She was not given to talking to herself or swearing, but the cookstove could trigger a bout of both.
She lit the fire and put the eye back in the cooktop. She opened the vent to let air into the chamber and was happy to see good fire and to hear kindling pop. It had taken Jim several sessions to show her which wood species to use when. They had inherited several winters’ worth of firewood from Lige Howell, and she had learned to tell rich pine from poplar, and actually admired the way dead locust bark made tinder. Poplar bark felt smooth, sourwood was rough and pitted, and she had found the hard way not to handle hairy vines of mature poison oak. But she still had trouble sorting green wood from dry.
Her fire began to warm the cooktop, so with a lifter she opened the lid and threw in a piece of poplar, which would have been fine had it been split last year. It was, however, what Jim called “greener’n a gourd,” a week ago part of a large limb that had crashed in a storm. Her object was to warm a bottle for Little Elizabeth, but the fire went out without even putting much char on the poplar billet.
“Phooey,” she muttered. To Little Elizabeth, happy on a blanket on the floor with two of her blocks, she said “Honey, your bottle will be warm in a minute.” When she lifted the lid, smoke curled into the room like an unwanted relative. With a glove she gingerly picked out the green wood, trotted it to the porch, and threw it into the yard.
An hour later Mack was up playing with his truck, Nell had a fire in the stove, and Little Elizabeth sucked from her bottle. The females sat in the kitchen rocker, Little Elizabeth pulling hard on the nipple and Nell fanning them with a magazine. “Wonder when Daddy’ll be home,” Nell said. “He’s at Mount Sterling but said he might be through early. We hope so, don’t we, darling?”
Something thrashed around in the pantry. Nell quit rocking and fanning and listened. She had almost gotten used to hearing creatures in the walls, but would still have a fit if one showed itself in daylight. “If that’s a mousie, it’s a pretty darn big mousie,” she said, and hugged Little Elizabeth. “Mommy won’t let it get her baby.”
They rocked until Little Elizabeth had drained the bottle, and her half-shut eyes made Nell hope she might take another nap. Carefully Nell laid her in her crib, and rubbed her daughter’s forehead with the back of her hand. Little Elizabeth seemed content to sleep.
Nell went back across the dogtrot to the kitchen and stood still. She checked her cookfire and, hoping to keep it until supper, added a piece of locust. She asked Mack to fetch potatoes from the basket on the back porch. Jim would eat potatoes seven days a week, and it was good, she thought, because they had God’s plenty of them. She began to peel and slice, thinking she had some hoop cheese, and scalloped potatoes would be good for a change. She heard Jim’s horse heading to the barn, and smiled.
From the corner of her eye she saw a brownish gray creature scuttle across the baseboard. Screaming, she threw potatoes, knife, skins, and bowl toward the ceiling, jumped onto a kitchen chair, and held on.
Jim knocked his hat off on the door frame as he rushed into the kitchen. “What is it?” he yelled. Nell pointed to the corner and continued to scream, now backed up by Mack and Little Elizabeth.
The creature jumped to the counter and aimed for the window over the sink. Jim put on his work gloves. Its tail was furry, its eyes were too big, and it wasn’t quite the color of a rat. The animal scraped its claws on the window glass like it was trying to tunnel out. When Jim caught it, he saw whitish pockets on its side. “It’s only a flying squirrel,” he yelled, but Nell still shrieked.
It turned and gnawed the back of his glove furiously. He hoped to make the back porch before the thing ate to the quick. Outside, he hurled squirrel and glove, which hit in the yard as one. The glove stayed but the skirted squirrel tumbled, jumped, soared to the smokehouse porch, and disappeared inside.
Back inside, Nell held Little Elizabeth. Both females were blubbery. Mack still looked out the kitchen window. “It was a flying squirrel,” Jim said. “They won’t hurt you. One of the Carters made a pet out of one when I was a boy.”
“Jim Hawkins, I don’t care. That thing was nasty and doesn’t belong in a proper house. You must promise me there aren’t any more. What if it had bit Little Elizabeth?”
He put his arm around his women. “Honey, it just crawled in somehow. Sometimes they come down the chimney. It was scareder of you than you were of it.”
“I have to lie down with Little Elizabeth now. If you want supper, you’ll have to fix it.” She went to their bedroom and shut the door.
He and Mack trotted to the barn to finish stabling the horse. “Daddy, Daddy, guess what?”
Jim hoisted his son with both hands. “What, big man?”
“Chicken squat,” yelled the boy.
Jim laughed, walked his son over to the chopping block, and made to turn him over his knee. “I’m a good mind to tan your hide for saying that,” he said, still chuckling. He let Mack rise and pointed a bony finger at him. “Son, don’t ever say that—in front of your mother.”
“’Kay, Daddy. I won’t.”
“Good. Now we got work to do.”
They
stabled the horse, cleaned up the kitchen, and then made what passed for supper, boiled potatoes, cold ham, cornbread, pickled beets. Jim brought in two armloads of firewood for each fireplace, while Mack made six trips for stove wood for the morning’s kitchen fire. Nell and Jim dressed the children for bed at the hearth, then kissed them good night. Nell put Little Elizabeth to bed, and Jim, Mack. After the children were down, Nell sighed.
“What’s the matter, honey?”
“Oh, Jim, I just don’t know if I’ll ever get used to living here.”
“Give it a chance, Nell. I’ve told you how great it was growing up. It will be that way for us, too. Especially for Mack and Lizzy. They won’t have all those city problems.”
“Like electricity? Or running water?”
“No, I’m talking about booze. Auto accidents. Getting pregnant before they’re married. Breathing car fumes. That kind of thing. And I’m working on both water and electricity. We should have our gravity system ready in the spring, and when they build the fire tower, it’ll have electricity we can use.”
“I received a letter from Mother today.”
“What did she say?”
“The usual. She wants us to move back to West Asheville.”
“Nell, I work for the park service. I have to live here.”
“Couldn’t you find another job?”
He laughed. “Nell, this is the closest to a perfect job a man could want. I’m in charge of where I grew up, and I mostly love it, except for trying to figure out who’s setting these confounded fires.”
“Well, I hate it. There’s rats and mice and bats and snakes and I don’t know what all. I don’t have anywhere to go except church. And what if the kids got really sick? They could die before we got them to a doctor.”
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