Oral History (9781101565612)

by Smith, Lee

  We were having sherry in his drawing room, as I recall; beyond the heavy draperies, certain noises intruded from the street: yelling, laughter, and an occasional shot. It was “Court Day,” regarded as a great spectacle by the entire region, many of whom “come to court” to jeer and disport themselves, considering this the highest form of entertainment. After court they stayed on, to drink and carouse in the streets. Fist-fights of course occur. If I had not previously arranged to keep my room at the Smith Hotel, I should have been unable to find a bed in the whole of the town—or perhaps not!!! For I detect a certain twinkle in the eye of Mrs. Justine Poole!

  But first: the Rev. Aldous Rife smiled at my assertions that I have come here to make some contribution, however slight, to the cause of civilization, that I wish to find in Nature the source of that religious impulse which has been stifled rather than nurtured by the rigid disciplines of the Episcopal Church, the church of my youth. He laughed drily, I say, and offered me more sherry; when I declined, he poured himself another glassful and tossed it off as if it were water.

  “God help you, then,” he said, and from his tone I could not tell whether he meant those words in irony or good will.

  I reentered the Smith Hotel to find Mrs. Justine Poole a bit tipsy, flinging her soft form against mine in a kind of spurious “accident” as I bade her good evening and passed through the hall. I lay in bed that evening rigid, my eyes and loins burning, as I listened to shouts and laughter out in the street and to the rhythmic thumping of the bed in the room above mine, a noise punctuated at intervals by a man’s soft curses and a woman’s (Mrs. Justine Poole’s?) ecstatic cries. I could not see the repetition of violets. For some reason I held my hand outstretched before me; I could see nothing. But I felt my fingers tremble in the dark.

  I saw her hair, her face; I heard her voice. The woman above me screamed. I imagined the high solitude of Hoot Owl Holler, the clean purity of her barren life. I am resolved to go there, this week. I am resolved to find her.

  As the days drag past until the coming Saturday, I find myself turning again and again to this poem in the collection I so luckily brought along. It is Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” which I set down here:Come live with me and be my love,

  And we will all the pleasures prove

  That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,

  Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

  And we will sit upon the rocks,

  Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks,

  By shallow rivers to whose falls

  Melodious birds sing madrigals.

  And I will make thee beds of roses

  And a thousand fragrant posies,

  A cap of flowers, and a kirtle

  Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;

  A gown made of the finest wool

  Which from our pretty lambs we pull;

  Fair-lined slippers for the cold,

  With buckles of the purest gold;

  A belt of straw and ivy buds,

  With coral clasps and amber studs:

  And if these pleasures may thee move,

  Come live with me, and be my love.

  The shepherds’ swains shall dance and sing

  For thy delight each May morning:

  If these delights thy mind may move,

  Then live with me and be my love.

  I cannot adequately express the exaltation this poem arouses in my heart, when I read it aloud to myself, accompanied as it always is by the most vivid mental image of Dory Cantrell. The words seem to dance in the air! I begin to think that I myself may begin to write, and it occurs to me that this extreme sensitivity which has always been my curse may in the end prove to be my salvation. We shall see.

  October 19th

  I set out this morning—Saturday—for Hoot Owl Holler (rather than Black Rock, my accustomed direction of a weekend, these days), filled with a well-nigh unbearable mixture of elation, apprehension, and excitement, emotions which seem, now in retrospect, prophetic. It is a long walk, though very beautiful, from Meeting House Branch, where this schoolhouse is, to Hoot Owl Holler. I stopped at the store in Tug to pass the time of day and buy a soda, some hoop cheese and crackers. I have never yet entered this store—run, of course, by the afore-mentioned Wall Johnson with the help of his malformed wife—I have never entered it, I say, when a poker game is not in progress in the back room! They say it has been going on for forty years. Although Wall Johnson treats me with uniform deference—I do quite a bit of shopping here, now that I am sleeping at the schoolhouse—we are not easy with one another. For I am what they call a “foreigner.” As they use it, this term does not necessarily refer to someone from another country, or even from another state, but simply to anybody who was not born in this area of the county. Their insularity astounds. At any rate, I purchased my lunch in Wall Johnson’s store and munched meditatively as I paced the trail, or “trace” as they say, proceeding to Hoot Owl Holler. The autumn foliage is at its loveliest, and I must say the beauty of the area quite took my breath away. The trace is well-traveled until one attains the “mouth” of the “holler”; there, in a gloomy group of pines, the paths diverged. I forded the lovely creek and took the steeper, rockier grade—the “path less traveled”!!!—which runs for the most part along that same creek while climbing swiftly. I looked back at each turn, to find the panoramic vista below me more and more beautiful. Yet it was, too, unspeakably remote, and somehow alien and sad. There is, according to Mrs. Justine Poole, some witch-tale told about this holler; yet that is true, I’m sure, of more than half the county. I could see, however, that a place so dramatically remote and glamorous would naturally give rise to legends of this sort, just as fog would cling to its coves, and mists obscure its mountaintops. I had begun to feel quite uneasy when the sight of woodsmoke rising up into the fair blue sky set my mind partially at ease. I rounded the last sharp turn and happened suddenly upon a large young woman coming down the same path I was ascending. It was not Dory. This young woman, obviously older, bore a broad impassive face with dark, somehow almost burning eyes. She looked to be, perhaps, part Indian.

  “Good morning,” I said cheerily.

  To my utter astonishment, she cast her apron up over her head and emitted three loud piercing shrieks! Then she turned and raced back up the path whence she had come, each of her long strides covering as much ground as a man’s. The cool wind, which had been frittering away at my heels all morning, picked up considerably at this point and began to blow in earnest, moaning through the trees. I grew conscious of a certain hostility in the environment. Somewhere ahead, I heard voices; a dog began to bark. Yet the steep path was empty of all save the brilliant, blowing leaves. I squared my shoulders, somewhat unnerved, and continued on. At length I attained the cabin, which sits in a high indentation among the three mountains, commanding a truly dazzling prospect, an awesome vista, below.

  A large woman, both imposing and imperious, appeared in the door, with a frail child behind her, clinging to her legs. I could see immediately the resemblance between this woman and the girl I had encountered on the path: no mother and daughter were ever more alike.

  She stared at me.

  I removed my hat and bowed.

  “God almighty,” a masculine voice spoke, and I turned to see a tall muscular young man—evidently one of those “ brothers” Dory mentioned—who materialized now at the side of the cabin and stood there stock-still in that curiously impending way of mountain men. Then he smiled. It was not a friendly smile.

  “Allow me to introduce myself,” I said with as much forthrightness as I could muster. “I’m Richard Burlage, the new schoolteacher down at the Meeting House Branch. Jink’s teacher,” I said, smiling, and yet the woman at the door—now joined by her look-alike daughter—continued to stare impassively.

  “I’m attempting to determine whether or not all the eligible children in my district are in fact enrolled in school,” I said. “This little girl, for
instance. What is your name, dear?”

  “Mary,” she said immediately, to my immense relief.

  “Mary,” I said. “Should she not be in school, along with Jink?”

  Nobody answered. But the child named Mary smiled and came to stand in front of her mother. She was so thin that the delicate white bones were almost visible in her face, a face, I should add, of nearly unbearable sweetness.

  “She’s got fits,” the daughter said finally.

  The young man laughed.

  Mary smiled sweetly, staring.

  All of them stared.

  I stood my ground, more nervous by the moment. I had not the faintest idea how to proceed—it all being mostly a ruse, of course, to see her, and yet having found myself so strangely touched by the poor sick child in this hostile environment. I don’t know what I would have done had not a commanding figure appeared, riding up on horseback from somewhere in the mountains behind the cabin. It had to be Almarine Cantrell. He was followed by a younger man, undoubtedly another of his sons. We had all turned to watch his approach— myself, with growing dread. Never have I seen a figure more forbidding, more remote. Pale, chiseled features like the angel of death himself. Piercing blue eyes. A large, spare, athletic physique. He wore a black coat and one of those shapeless dark hats favored by mountain men, pulled down low across his face.

  “What’s going on here?” he asked—I should say “growled”—swinging down from his mount.

  “Hit’s naught but the schoolteacher,” the woman said. “He’s wanting Mary to go to school.”

  Almarine Cantrell sat his horse and regarded me sternly.

  Then, as luck would have it, she came around the house carrying a bucket of water in each hand, quite flushed by her exertions. She set the buckets down immediately. “Why, Mr. Burlage!” she said. She was even lovelier than I had remembered, a beautiful flower growing among these weeds.

  I addressed her father. “If Mary is too ill to come to school,” I said, “perhaps I could send some things to her from time to time, and Jink or someone could help her learn.”

  “Oh, I can!” Dory said immediately. “Oh please, Daddy, say yes!”

  Mr. Cantrell looked at Dory and his countenance softened in a way I cannot describe. For a moment he appeared to be a thoroughly different kind of man. His high regard for his beautiful daughter was abundantly clear. He turned then to look at me: in retrospect, I am amazed that I withstood so well the rigors of that gaze. Then, apparently satisfied with whatever he saw, he nodded brusquely, swung up on his horse again, and rode away. The woman took Mary by the hand, pulling her back, and shut the door. The young man grinned and spat in the dirt near my feet.

  “This here’s my brother Nun,” Dory said.

  “Howdy,” Nun said, his temporary civility another testament to Dory’s position in her family. Of course, they would love her, I thought. Of course. “Be seeing you,” said Nun, regarding me darkly before he went off in the direction his father and brother had gone.

  “Well.” Suddenly I felt completely drained, totally exhausted. “Well.” I looked at her. The October sunlight fanned through her hair and it seemed truly golden; I noticed, for the first time, the golden hoops at her ears. The cool brisk wind had reddened her cheeks and seemed to make her eyes appear, if possible, a deeper blue, as if, in fact, she were a part of “October’s bright blue weather.” She smiled. I recalled my ostensible purpose: “Here,” I said, reaching into my bag for the books I had brought. “These are for Mary. You can read them to her.” I don’t know how I knew that Dory would be able to read, how I intuited that she alone among all those children was the only one whom Almarine Cantrell had allowed to complete the “education,” such as it was, offered in the elementary schoolhouse at Tug. And yet I discerned this truth immediately, as though we had known each other for hundreds—no, thousands!—of years.

  This, I see now, is the sense I had when first she appeared at the schoolhouse: that knowledge of inevitability, that feeling of recognition. She took the books and turned—as I say, inevitably—to accompany me as I retraced my steps back down the mountain trail. She matched her pace to mine, so that we descended even that rocky trail as one, flawlessly. I confess I breathed more easily the more distance we put between ourselves and that strangely forbidding cabin! We spoke as we walked, but her hair blew forward and I could not always see her face. We spoke so easily, as if we were old confidants; even our vastly different manners of speech seemed to meet and blend together into some single tongue we share, as the many instruments in the orchestra produce the symphony.

  We talked. I say we talked, and yet I cannot now retain the continuity of our conversation. The whole afternoon seems to me like a multifaceted jewel-hung pendant on a golden chain, a jewel whch flashes and turns and offers its multitudinous secret gleams of light.

  “Is your family always so unfriendly to strangers?” I remember asking, and I recall how she laughed in response.

  “I told you not to come up here,” she said. “Didn’t I tell you that? Ain’t nobody comes up here much, you can see fer why.”

  “But are you happy?” I asked—I think I asked—desperately. “Stuck way up here with your family, so many of you in that house? What do you do all day?” I paused, and she looked at me as if I were crazy.

  “Do?” she said. “Lord, they’s a-plenty to do!” She giggled then, but I couldn’t see her face behind the shining screen of her hair.

  “But what will happen to you?” I asked in a kind of frenzy. “You can’t stay up here like this forever. Why don’t you move over to Black Rock, finish school? or get a job?”

  “I reckon I’ll git married sometime,” she said. “I reckon I’ll stay till I do.”

  This jolted me. I grabbed her arm, rather more roughly than I had intended.

  “Is it anyone particular?” I asked. “Are you engaged?”

  “Engaged?”

  “Spoken for,” I said. “Well, are you?”

  “I ain’t,” she said simply, and how my heart leapt at these words! “They’s one boy, Little Luther Wade he is, what wouldn’t mind, I guess, but so far I ain’t been too interested. Why do you reckon not?” she asked suddenly, looking at me, and I saw myself then in her eyes as some superior being from another place, with a fund of “knowledge” beyond her ken. Thus I realized how I seem to her. I understood my position and my responsibility.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I answered easily, although what I felt at that moment was more chagrin than ease. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  “What about you?” she asked, showing more initiative than I had thought she possessed. “Are you engaged?” And I noted how quickly she had picked up the new word.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not.” I made this admission for the first time with relief and not regret.

  “Looky here,” she said suddenly, leaning down to pluck a large brown and black caterpillar from the scudding leaves. She allowed it to crawl across her upraised palm. “See how wooly it is?” she said. “Hit’s a hard winter coming ahead.”

  This remark jolted me, revealing as it did such a profound simplicity, such a oneness with the natural things of the earth. We had reached the end of the holler path, the point where one must ford the creek. The wind rose steadily and acorns fell at our feet. Leaves whirled around us. She turned to go, and I was filled with an instantaneous and total despair. I realized that any emotion I thought I had felt for any girl, before this time, had been nothing: counterfeit. This was, as they say, the real thing!

  I grabbed her shoulder and turned her around so that, for the first time that afternoon, we stood face to face. Her beauty was breathtaking. Then all our differences, all the exigencies of fate, seemed to rise up between us like a shield, cutting us apart entirely, and I became desperate. I resolved to clear up the mysteries.

  “Listen,” I blurted. “Listen. What’s going on up there? What did that girl—that woman—”

  “You mean Ora Mae,” she said.r />
  “Ora Mae, then. Why did she scream out like that when I came upon her on the mountain? You know the way she screamed?”

  Dory threw back her head and laughed. “I would of done it too,” she said, “iffen you’d come upon me. You shouldn’t of come up here by yourself. You got to come up here with people we know.”

  “Buy why?” I asked, tightening my grip on her shoulders.

  Dory smiled out of her eyes. “Hit ain’t nothing personal,” she said. “Now I’ve got to get on back.”

  “But what’s the big secret?” I asked. “I worry about you, living away up here.”

  She smiled mischievously. “Maybe hit’s all hanted, this whole holler. Ain’t you heard about that?”

  “About what?” I wanted to draw her out.

  “Nuthin’,” she said, and as she spoke, the antic wind blew harder, lifting her hair.

  “Those are beautiful earrings,” I said. “May I see one? The tracings on them remind me of a design which I once saw, if I recall correctly, in Florence.” As soon as I spoke I was mortified, afraid she would think I was “putting on airs,” as they say here, and realizing too that she could have no concept of where Florence might be. “May I see one?” I asked again, quickly, to cover my embarrassment.

  But instead of handing one of the earrings over, as I had expected her to do, she stepped even closer to me and put up both hands to lift her hair up off her neck, inclining her head slightly to the side.

  “There,” she said.

  I was intoxicated, I was overcome by her nearness!