The Secret Wisdom of the Earth

by Christopher Scotton

  “Aint there an old loggin road up the back way? My grandaddy’s been up there,” Buzzy said, taking back his usual demeanor.

  “There is. You gotta drive forty miles into Blue, then walk the last three to get to the lake. No disrespect to your grandaddy, but that way is a cheat. If you’re gonna tramp properly, it requires you to strap forty pounds of gear to your back and walk for at least two days in the woods.”

  After a few miles Pops began to slow down, even though there was no detectable break in the thick forest. Suddenly an old road materialized, like a secret passageway, from the solid block of trees and undergrowth. Thick kudzu hung down from heavy limbs; hip-high thistle and horseweed labored to meet it in the middle. Pops stopped and turned slowly into the dark tunnel. It took a few seconds to adjust to the dim. A heavy canopy of leaves and overgrowth blocked out most of the light, leaving the road in perpetual twilight. The forest floor was peopled with huge ferns that sent their arms invitingly up and out. The road was hard-packed dirt with traces of old gravel and rock in the wheel ruts. Monumental trees, the largest I’d ever seen, covered in thick green moss on one side.

  We followed the road in the murky light for about a mile until the hills began to close in and the pitch of the track pointed up, taking us onto the shoulder of a steep, rocky rise. We kept on the narrow course for a half mile more along the north shoulder of a sheer mountain. Knee-high loosestrife and jimson scraped the undercarriage; overhanging pipevine slapped the side-view mirror. Buzzy took his arm off the windowsill. Pops said that he was going to get a man up to clear the road next spring.

  We drove across a ridge overlooking Beaver Hollow. I recognized Tilroy’s house and the barn in the back where Sen Budget shot the family mule.

  “I didn’t know you lived near the Budgets growing up.”

  “A few hollows over, thank goodness,” Pops said with a half smile.

  We descended into a heavily wooded valley of even larger trees—old, majestic oaks, sycamores, and hickories—then forded a swollen stream that sometime past had been bridged, for the rottings of a wood foundation fell about both sides. The road flattened, following the valley floor deeper into the hollow. The mountain closed in until we were squeezed in a narrow cut no more than fifty feet across. Up ahead a huge sycamore had fallen across the road. “Looks like our Tramp is gonna start a few miles early,” Pops said and pulled right up to the tree, shut off the engine, and exited the truck. We followed. The constant rain had given the woods steaming, rain-forest air. We pulled our packs out of the back and affixed them. Pops took up an old burled and polished walking stick with intricate carvings on the handle. I asked him about it and he held it up to the light and smiled, regarding the stick as if fond reminiscences were stored somewhere in the wood. “My father took this out of the core of a lightning-struck tree. The heat from the lightning made it as strong as steel. Gave it to me on my thirteenth birthday a few years before he died. Now I use it to beat back bears.” He laughed and swung it like a baseball bat.

  We followed the huge tree trunk to where we could slip under and over the spread of upper branches, then walked back up to the old road to begin the Tramp. Pops first, me, then Buzzy single file in one of the wheel ruts. The road curved around the steep side of a hill, then straightened out as the valley narrowed even more. A creek rushed down the middle, overflowing from the recent rains. As we rounded another sharp turn, two bus-size boulders bulged into either side of the road, leaving a gap just wide enough for a single car. “When I was a kid, I named these two boulders Ahab and Moby Dick.” He reached over and gave Ahab an affectionate pat. “They are my sentries.”

  Once we were through Ahab and Moby Dick, the mountain walls gave way and the valley opened to a wide half-hourglass hollow, three hundred yards across and five hundred yards deep. A sheer rock wall eighty feet high at the far end with a full waterfall cascading to a broad pool on a rise. From there the water spilled down the hill and became the rushing creek we had crossed minutes before. The fields had gone fallow years ago, and saplings grew in them like giant corn.

  The road hugged the edge of the valley and ended abruptly at a cul-de-sac of ruins. Straight ahead, a jumble of old logs from an ancient cabin splayed like pick-up sticks. To my right, a single cinder-block chimney competed with young trees for prominence. A thick oak door, weathered gray and long off its hinges, rested sideways against a rusted woodstove. Up the hill, several more foundations watched us through the underbrush.

  But to my left, on the end of the slight ledge that led down to the fields and the creek, was a perfectly ordered stone-and-log cabin, preserved like a slip-covered antique.

  It was small. A low roof sloped up slightly from a porch that ran along the entire front. Four thick knotted wood posts, polished from the years, held the porch ceiling upright. The door was solid and dark and cracked in places where the wood grain weakened—bright, modern lockage as out of place as chrome on a Model T. Two large windows on either side of the door traded sunlight for warmth in winter.

  “Who lives here?” I asked.

  “Nobody now,” Pops said. We stepped onto the porch, took off our packs, and laid them down with a thud. Some early fallen leaves collected in the corner. Pops pulled keys from his pocket and fiddled them until the correct one untangled. “This is where I was born,” he said and turned the key in the lock. “This is Jukes Hollow.” He pushed the door open and I stepped into another time.

  The first room was the kitchen: sixties-era plates, cups, flatware, took dust in an oak cupboard against the far wall. Pine floor planks announced our every step. To my left, a large cast-iron cookstove sat in perfect repair waiting for a chance to fire again. The floor in front of it worn a half inch into itself. A small table with six chairs was pushed near the stove as if to covet its remaining warmth.

  In the adjoining living room, a smaller woodstove sat against the wall in the space where most families now put televisions. Two chairs, separated by a simple table, faced the stove as if entertainment had been sought in the way that wood burns. The interior walls were whitewashed log, the thin paint giving the grain extra emphasis. An old stuffed bobcat head hung on the wall over an empty shelf.

  At the back of the cabin were two bedrooms. The first was tiny, even smaller than my room at Chisold Street. I couldn’t imagine three boys sharing such a space. A miniature window cut into the logs let in a slash of the world. Triple bunk beds hewn from local oak attached to the walls like shelves.

  The other bedroom was twice its size. It was empty except for a huge four-poster bed, stripped of its mattress. The wood was honey-colored hickory; its posts, like small trees, almost touched the ceiling. The headboard was intricately carved with a strong woman sidesaddle on a majestic plumed horse held by an attending young man. At the footboard, two broadswords crossed over a flying bird. An eagle or maybe a hawk.

  “My father’s brother made that bed for him as a wedding present,” Pops said, standing behind me. “Copied the carving from a woodcut of Queen Victoria’s seal that a traveling stove salesman gave him. My mother wasn’t an ostentatious woman, but she loved that bed.” We stood there for a moment, regarding the workmanship. “Come on, I want to show you boys something,” he said.

  We walked outside to the fields. Pops had cut the saplings back ten feet from the cabin and maintained a path through them to the stream. On the right were the ruins of an old barn; left was a collection of abandoned farm equipment—plows, harnesses, some hand tools—under a collapsed shed. A tractor wheel with three trees growing through it.

  We stopped at a crumbled stone fence that long ago demarcated the crops from the cows. It was just noon and the sun had attained Brice Mountain and was shining brightly into us. With the sunlight and the waterfall and the steep rock walls, Jukes Hollow was one of the most beautiful places I had ever seen.

  Pops put his foot up on a rock. “You know, my brothers and I couldn’t wait to leave this place. The Company offered free housing in town, so ju
st about everyone left. Only my mother stayed—died in that cabin seven years ago.”

  “Where is everybody now?” Buzzy asked.

  “Spread out all over. Hersh and Katie Mae have four children; three are married with kids of their own. Patsy lives in Florida, Glenda near Pittsburgh, and Dibley lives in Lexington, runs an auto-glass business.”

  “What about the fourth?” I asked.

  “Den? We lost him in the Vietnam War,” Pops answered. “Let’s see, Jeb’s kids are all over the place too. He had seven and I couldn’t even begin to track them. Except Dealy, who runs the farm over by Big Spoon. I’ll take you there sometime—he has a boy about your age.”

  We paused for a minute as packets of memories flooded back to him.

  “Come on,” he finally said and stepped over the pile of stones. We continued down toward the creek, where thick flat rocks had been placed in the water for crossing purposes. Once on the other side, we walked toward the waterfall, where the ground rose slightly, bracing the sides of the pool, which gathered the water before running it down through the rest of the hollow. The waterfall cooled the air and the constant rushing sound made it easy to think.

  Thirty yards back from the pool, at the start of the Brice Mountain incline, was a tiny cemetery. Twenty wooden posts outlined its authority, their connecting fence pieces long since lost. The grass in the cemetery was low-cut and weed-free, as if they knew not to bespoil such hallowed ground. The front headstones, overtaken by rich moss, jutted from the earth at odd angles. The slope of the hill made the other markers seem like seatbacks in a movie theater. Despite the lack of fencing, Pops and I walked through what used to be the entrance gate. Buzzy stayed a few feet outside the perimeter watching us.

  I drifted among the headstones, working my way up the small hill, reading my history in the granite chiselings. Pops had told me all the stories, and finally, I was attaching something tangible to my ancestors.

  George Cranmore Peebles, my great-great-great-grandfather, who first staked claim to Jukes Hollow with his wife, Carlotta, and his brother Morley in 1849, had left Pembroke in Wales two years earlier and after a stint on the docks in Baltimore, set off for the west country. They were buried in the near corner of the graveyard, marked by three flat pieces of jagged slate pounded into the ground, the crude inscriptions long since taken by the elements.

  Sadie Peebles Kinneycut Johnson Jar Bean, one of George and Carlotta’s five children, who outlived four husbands (none of whom rated burial in Jukes Hollow) and eight children and finally died at eighty-three of an infected thumb she received from a dogwood splinter while chopping wood with a hand ax.

  Bradley Wilson Peebles, Sadie’s little brother, who fought for the Confederacy in the last years of the war at the tender age of fourteen because some home guardsmen thought him fit and snatched poor Bradley from the hollow despite Carlotta’s attempts to hide him in the smokehouse. He returned at sixteen with killing eyes and sent himself off west without a word. He reappeared in Jukes Hollow eighteen years later, a German wife and a young son in tow. The boy had been born in a soddy during a scrap with a handful of renegade Kiowas. They named him Franklin Cranmore Peebles—Pops’ grandfather.

  In the row behind was the stone of Oriel Peebles, Pops’ father. I lingered by his headstone and remembered the stories Pops had told me of my great-grandfather’s efforts to organize the mines and his murder at the hands of the Company’s detectives, on order from Bubba Boyd’s father. Next to him was Pops’ mother. A simple headstone as befit her nature:

  EMILY LITTLETON PEEBLES

  BORN AUGUST 26, 1894, DIED JUNE 1, 1978

  Next to her was a small marker; light-green lichen obliterated some of the lettering.

  HELEN BRAN EEBLES, BORN JAN 3, 914

  DIED OF CONSUM FEB ARY 18, 1917

  KATHER LI EBLES, BOR AY 22, 18

  DIED MAY 23, 1918

  WINNEFRED STON PEEBLES BO JANU 7, 1921

  DI APRI 1, 1924

  BEL DAUGHTERS OF EMIL AN ORIEL PEEBL

  Pops was at the top edge of the cemetery, kneeling down, pulling young weeds from around a headstone, talking to someone in the air. I walked up behind him quietly.

  “I brought Kevin up, like I said I would,” he whispered between the waterfall sounds. “I wanted to wait until the time was right.”

  A crack of twig announced my presence. He stood with a handful of chickweed, letting most of it fall absently into the wind. The marker by his feet was clean and moss-free, the ground around it trim and perfect, like the yard at Chisold Street.

  SARAH WINTHORPE PEEBLES

  BORN APRIL 19, 1920

  DIED IN LABOR DECEMBER 1, 1949

  A VOICE LESS LOUD, THROUGH ITS JOYS AND FEARS

  Pops knelt again and pulled at nonexistent weeds.

  “She loved this place,” he said, looking up at the ridge above us where the trees were holding summer green. “Loved the way the waterfall had an answer for everything.” He stood and turned toward it. “We used to picnic on the other side there.” He pointed to a flat spot by the water where a magnolia shaded that part of the pool. “I must have played there a thousand times when I was growing up and thought nothing of it. Then she comes and makes it the most important place in the universe to me.”

  We stood on the hill, Pops and me, looking over Jukes Hollow: the creek, the fields, the cabin, the rocks. I saw in my mind how it must have looked then. The barn and the other houses crowded around the circle. Children raised in a pack, infused with laughter and purpose and a desire to rise above.

  And how it was now, empty and unused, the lives and laughter long moved on, leaving just remembrances and the roots attached to them. I started to understand why Pops could never sell Jukes Hollow. The idea of Bubba Boyd and his tractors filling everything in with Bridger Mountain overburden infuriated me. “How could they even think of destroying this place? I just don’t get it.”

  “Men like Bubba Boyd think the earth owes them a living. They take whatever wealth they can from the mountains and move on. I actually feel sorry for him, I really do. He can’t for the life of him see the simple beauty in a waterfall or understand the importance of history and place. If I have one hope for you, Kevin, it’s that you never become one of those men.”

  The mountains have their own memories.

  Rooted in marrow rock, hard set to the crests, fused in the folds and braes where the white water races. Their earliest recollections manifested to primordial, wild and feral, then became tamed with the people. Cheek Mountain and the Pierce boys grappling and shredding each other over Docey Eberhild—she chose Strom, which made Quillar flee west; Goat Leg Hollow and Wilmer Gilvens, two months off a coffin ship, sinking cabin piers into her flat shoulder and the cabin shaping up week to week with a front-porch view of Indian Head; Corbin Hollow and Bertum Skill courting, then marrying a half-wild Melugeon girl named Hetta Goins despite banishment threats from his father; Sadler Mountain and Nevis Jensen teaching his son Jesper how to read the dullings for turkey sign on an autumn dawn. They all remember Bobby Clinch and the orphan bear cub he raised to adult on saved meat scraps and deer killings; and years later when Bobby came upon it over by Indian Head, the bear on hinds, taking in man scent, head cocked in recognition. All these old memories rooted in the earth, now pulled out and piled in cairns of spoil or pushed down the hollows to level the land.

  Chapter 25

  THE TWICE-TOOK MOUNTAINS

  We ate cold ham sandwiches slathered with Audy Rae’s homemade mustard by the waterfall where Pops and Sarah Winthorpe used to picnic. “When I brought her up here, all my kin could do was gawp. It was like an alien goddess had landed in Jukes. She had this flowing chestnut hair halfway down her back.” He shook his head. “They had never seen anyone so beautiful. But they soon found out that her true beauty came from here,” he said and tapped at my heart.

  Pops smiled at the recollection and folded the plastic sandwich baggies and put them in his pack and stood and sl
ung it on his shoulders. Buzzy and I did the same. We were at the base of the sheer rock wall that ran the western end of the hollow. We walked over to the circle of ruins where the wall face eased and allowed for climbing.

  “We’re gonna have to climb up to get to the trailhead. My brothers and I never got around to cutting stairs into the rock. There are some well-placed vines as ropes if needed. Follow me rock for rock, boys.” He reached and pulled himself up to the first rock, then put his foot into a crevice and pushed up to the next toehold, then again to the next one. I followed and Buzzy came after. About halfway up, ledges jutted out, which made the ascent much easier, like a set of steep basement steps.

  Near the top he took his pack off and threw it over the edge of the wall, then jumped up and grabbed the root of a sapling that had grown out of the rock. He pulled himself up and over the edge. After a minute, Buzzy and I reached the final ledge. I looked down over the hollow, at Pops’ birth cabin, over at the cemetery, and back to Ahab and Moby Dick, faithfully guarding the entrance to Jukes Hollow. It was a hard life then, but the simple dignity with which they lived it made me proud. We took off our packs, threw them up to the ledge, then scrambled over the rimrock.

  The bracing creek ran straight down the middle of a bowl-shaped valley that ascended to a peak eight hundred feet above us. A thin dirt and rock trail at creek side snaked up the mountain. We affixed our packs and followed Pops on the trail to the rushing water sounds. The pack was heavy on the incline and the straps dug into my shoulders. I could hear Buzzy huffing behind me. Pops’ gait was long and certain, and soon he was a hundred feet ahead, navigating the awkward course and jutting rocks with an ease and grace I didn’t know was in him. I looked back at Buzzy, red-faced and sweating. He was focused on his feet, watching one go in front of the other. “We gotta catch up.” I breathed and expanded my step to narrow the difference. Buzzy grunted and matched me. Pops had paused on a flat rock overlooking a three-stage waterfall, leaning on his walking stick, drinking from his canteen.