Listen Here

by Sandra L. Ballard

  RETURN THE INNOCENT EARTH (1973)

  from Chapter 1

  We came from the airport to the factory, stopping only at the gleaming new motel on the south edge of town to leave my two-suiter. (There are so many who would have claimed me if they had known I was coming: my brother, Monty, Aunt Nettie Sue, and others. But this time I needed the loneliness of a purchased room. There are some things money can buy and loneliness is one of them.) Price brought me up-to-date on inventory in our Churchill warehouses, told me of plans to cut back to winter production of dry-pack foods. And when he spoke of “Burl Smelcer's wife” he kept his eyes on the road, staring straight ahead. “She never pulled out of the coma after her last convulsion. After all, she was sixty-nine years old.”

  “Probably looked ninety-nine,” I said.

  He nodded vigorously. “Old Burl's already given up trying to figure out what killed her off.” When I didn't push him he glanced at me briefly. “Her kinfolks will be sitting up with the body tonight and funeralizing tomorrow. Outside of that, everything's quiet as cat fur.” Price Sims’ effort to talk like a mountain man seemed to me to degrade the poor old woman who had died so agonizingly, who—despite Stull's and Price's efforts to keep her anonymous—had a personality, an entity.

  At the factory trucks were unloading the last crop of beans. Late limas, shed of their thick tough pods, and long stringless green beans, as prolific and standard-length as years of cross-breeding could make them, were pouring down the chutes into the washing vats, onto the conveyor belts where rows of women inspected them. Once in the cans, and in the big iron retorts, high-pressure cooking would tenderize them, making them seem young and delicate.

  “We sprayed these?” I asked Price.

  He nodded. “We're keeping this pack separate, at least for the time being.” He picked up a handful of the bright emerald beans. His voice was a low awed whisper. Even I could barely hear it. “They held at this stage of their growth for a whole week. Damnedest thing I ever saw. Right at their prime. And their flavor is the finest we've ever packed, at least since I've been around Clayburn-Durant.” In a few minutes we went up to the offices, leaving behind the curious stares of the weather-worn women on the inspection line, and in Price's office we talked with one of the plant superintendents and the sales chief for this region.

  Later I borrowed Price's car and in the falling part of the afternoon, as old Cebo used to say, I came out here to the fields. Alone. The gigantic bean pickers were just moving off. I watched them roll out of the fields with the massive tread of dinosaurs, their long mechanical necks (for spitting out vines and stalks and leaves) weaving slightly like the necks of those prehistoric animals, sluggish and cumbersome. A stench of oil and fuel trailed behind them like offal. Where they passed the vines are strewn and crushed, the earth packed hard as asphalt.

  I try to stir the dirt with the toe of my shoe. It is as unyielding as the concrete of streets I have just left. When we tended this land we were careful to keep it loose and loamy, never plowing too wet for fear it would bake into clods, making sure it could breathe. I can remember hearing about the day Elisha Clayburn, my grandfather, stood not far from where I am tonight and let the rich black dirt filter through his hands, saying, “The land outlives us all—” and within the month he was dead. Now Clayburn Foods has just about come full term. Now our tractors and cultivators and planters gouge up the earth, turn it to rows, beat the clods to dust, feed it, irrigate it, make it yield whatever those gleaming cans demand. I can trace the ridges of the departed dinosaur's tracks even in the early darkness. Once the Clayburns treated the land as if it were a deep, warm, fertile woman worthy of all the care they could lavish. Now the using is all.

  Lightning scrawls across the sky like a match struck against the darkness. It has been a long day. Suddenly it is night and the river below me is drowned in shadows. The distant mountains loom dark and threatening as the humpbacked forms of half-submerged whales. The fields are stripped and deserted.

  I should go back into town and phone Ellie. I should go to Burl Smelcer's and talk about Perlina. Above all, I should call Deborah. But I do not leave this narrow strip between the bean field and the river for a few more minutes. Some information fed into my system a long time ago holds me here. It has been years since I have walked these fields.

  Thunder rumbles off in the west. Pumpkin wagons rolling, the old farmers used to say. Freshness of approaching rain rides the new wind.

  The river down below me murmurs in the darkness. Where it reaches under the banked roots of a gaunt old water oak it gurgles strangely, gradually tearing away the earth supporting those aged roots.

  Summer has lingered into autumn this year and only today the giant bean-picking machines finished harvesting this field. It is almost time for killing frost. Trunks of the sycamores along the river shine like bleached skeletons under the fitful moonlight that comes and goes in the stormy sky. Starvation moon, the Cherokees who were once here called it.

  I have been a company man for a long time but not so long, quite, that I have lost myself, although I learned yesterday that there is much I have buried and need to remember, for the company, for myself.

  The river has made this earth I'm standing on, dragging topsoil and debris down from the uplands to enrich it for generations. And land such as this across America has made Clayburn-Durant Foods, which has been my life. None of the Clayburns has been here in a long while, too damn long.

  On the plane this morning coming down the great mid-continent flyway I watched the warrens and hives and colonies of cities and suburbs dwindle and disappear as the mountains thrust up their peaks and labyrinths, and I wondered if there are many others in chrome and steel and styrofoam labyrinths today who know bone-deep, as I, the transition from an old landlocked earth to passage through air.

  My boyhood boots pulled against the suck of mud; my present British walkers have been jetted across continents of space and time. Down these muddy rows I used to drag battered crates and baskets; now my Gucci briefcase waits on the seat of the car at the edge of the field. I have two urbane children full of supplementary vitamins and enriched cereals but I remember yanking stubborn beets out of this ground, wringing off the purplegreen tops and stems which bled a resplendent juice more royal than blood, bending until my back was an aching stiffness and the smell of roots was bitter in my nostrils.

  Canning is part of two worlds and there is no escaping either. Land and computers. Seeds and machinery. Weather and sales charts. The gone-before and the yet-to-come are by-products of every can we fill. Yet in those big, sleek central offices in the midwestern metropolis where I live, we lose touch. Yesterday I learned how incredibly we lose touch.

  A nightbird calls from one of the beech trees. Unthinking, I reach for pockets—it is chilly and I am wearing a topcoat—hearkening back to the time when old Cebo, whose face was dark and wrinkled and tough as walnut bark, muttered that a screech owl's forebodings could be canceled only by turning all our pockets inside out. Standing in the deepening darkness, many distances from where I began this day, I wonder if the owl speaks of life or death, the present or future. Or perhaps the past. The past has been thick around me all day, like one of the fogs that sometimes sweeps across these Smoky Mountains, smothering all the familiar landmarks, changing contours, obscuring here and revealing there, until the oldest places are new and the new is made ancient, or seems so.

  It is the old past in that scent of ketchup which is here, waiting in the silent furrows, passing like the river in its wrenching, ceaseless course. But only yesterday is still raw within me. I'll have to settle many ghosts while I am here.

  In the distance, Burl Smelcer's unpainted house squats on a treeless rise. I must go there. But not tonight, not with the dead woman lying in the narrow room fetid with visitors and heat and food and curiosity—and, yes, mourning. I can see the light from the house, no larger than a firefly in the distance.

  I hear the screech owl again. Its quaveri
ng cry comes from a nearer tree this time. It makes me apprehensive. I do not seem to myself the same man who left the city this morning, brisk and businesslike even though in revolt. Here I know that the past is not dead. Or is it even past? Like all the data programmed into George Hodges’ computers, it waits raw and formless. And no one remembers more of it happening here than I do.

  Blood soaked into the ground. Sweat mixed with mud and crates of tomatoes and machine grease. Tears and terror and waste, hurt too deep for scars, pure joy, gall of mistakes, the sweet balm of success, and the reach out. And out. And out.

  I come from a line of remembering people. In generations past we built churches and ballads and a way of life out of our remembering, handing down words the way others pass along designs woven into coverlets, carved into wood, or worked into clay. But now that is going, too—the woven words and the cloth and all.

  Another slash of lightning breaks as I leave the field and the deep-running river and walk along the rutted road toward the car. Does anyone else care about Elisha Clayburn's violent death in these dark mountains or the inheritance he left Mary Clayburn and seven children? Does anyone know of his son Jonathan's improbable journey—so unlike most Clayburn ventures—to unravel the secret of Elisha's death? Does anyone recollect how another son, Daniel Clayburn, with the strong black arm of Lonas Rankin beside him, dreamed and pounded into being machines that made a little plant into a company?

  Does anyone recall the face or form of all those anonymous figures—black and white—who gave strength and substance to the Clayburns and their dream through patient, wrenching years and lifetimes? Does anyone at all remember Josh Clayburn's voice, the wounded look in his eyes as he broke before the ultimatum delivered by his own son, Stull? Or the ultimatum itself by which the company became larger than any Clayburn or all the family? And above all, does anyone remember (or can anyone who knew forget?) Jonathan Clayburn, carrying them all by his will and muscle?

  This is the memory I have come back to claim. My father. Shape of a world of love-honor-and-obey, of a-man's-word-is-his-bond, of love-thy-neighbor-as-thyself, of something far and lost, abandoned.

  I arrive at my car and climb in, turn the key with stiff fingers, head toward town. The first drops of rain fall. Their freshness mixes with the old and acrid smell of mulch and silt left by many floods covering these level plains below the mountains. The dark land stretches around me.

  The cold autumn rain is slashing hard against my windshield as I watch the road from the farm into Churchill. A car behind me pulls out to pass in an explosion of impatience. Its tires hiss on the wet pavement and its motor churns. As it cuts back into the right lane ahead of me the rear wheels slip. The driver brings it out of the skid. I wonder if the boy I glimpsed knows how narrowly he escaped plunging down the steep bank to our right. I watch his red tail-light fade into the distance. How did Dan Clayburn feel that long-ago day when his new car stalled in gravel and would not start again?

  We are fearfully and wonderfully made, my God-fearing, church-going father and mother told me. Is the foolish boy in that souped-up car? Does he know? Was Perlina Smelcer? Is Stull Clayburn and does he know? Do I know?

  No superman of sex or finance or honor. Six-feet-two with hair still dark brown and belly not yet flabby and not-quite twenty-twenty vision. My tennis and love-making are not so unyielding as when I was twenty but they have gained something in form and finesse and enjoyment. I still struggle to keep up with news of neighborhood, city, industry, country, world. The result: frustration, and a dozen riptides pressing in.

  A search began for me yesterday: for Jonathan Clayburn, Jr., Jon, in my early fifties, widower, father, business executive, fringe participant in religion and politics and sports and society, secret dreamer at intervals, occasional lover now in love. I ask only to be whole. And I realize the arrogance and impossibility of my asking.

  By the time I arrive at the motel the rain has settled to a steady downpour. I stop at the desk to pick up my room key and the clerk makes me welcome. Her formal greeting has been memorized from some innkeeper's manual but as I thank her she adds, “Turning cold yet? I heard thunder a little while ago. My grandpa always said autumn thunder meant a cold spell to come.”

  I smile at her and nod. All at once I love her. Her hair is set in beauty-parlor majesty and her dress is a wholesale replica of some high-fashion design shown in a slick magazine, her eyes even bear standard Cleopatra outlines and shadows. But the adaptation has not yet been total. It has not reached all the way inside. “My grandpa always said…”

  We can still remember.

  And I need to remember because I must go on. Without yesterday Clayburn-Durant Foods would not be here. The question is, will any of us—on foot or hoof or wing or fin or root—be here tomorrow?

  FROM THE FRENCH BROAD (1955)

  On the opposite side of the French Broad watershed, where bold Allen's Creek rushes down out of the Balsams, anyone you talk with up or down that creek and many adjoining ones can tell you who Granny Sarah McNabb is and where she lives. In a weathered little house yon side of the creek. There are still pockets of snow high up in the mountains around the narrow valley, but the buds on the cherry trees in Granny's yard are swelling toward spring. There are shocks of fodder and stacks of green wood in the yard too, for a son and his family live in part of Granny's house. Nevertheless, she does all her own cooking and keeping in the two front rooms she set aside for herself after she'd finished her life work as a midwife and divided up the farm among her children. Her face is round and webbed with fine lines and full of light. Its strength of character matches her lean body's strength of muscle.

  “Law, child, I've had to be strong. I'm eighty-four years old now and I've catched babies ever since I was twenty. The last one was when I was eighty. I slipped out in the night, none of the family knew about it, and I got back before morning. None of them know about it to this day.

  “I waited on two or three doctors at different times while I was growing up—everybody always said I had the turn to be a nurse—and after a while women started sending for me if they couldn't get the doctor, and pretty soon some of them wanted just me, wouldn't hear to a doctor looking after them. I couldn't count all the babies—five, six, seven hundred?—there was over a hundred I guess, that I never turned in at Raleigh. It was before I ever had those forms to fill. But out of all that number, over all those years, I never lost a baby or a mother. Oh, it wasn't none of my doing. It was the work of the Lord. I was just an instrument for Him to use.

  “During those years I got married and had children myself. There was ten of them, five boys and five girls, all still living today but one, and I've got forty grandchildren and fifty-two great-grandchildren and four great-great-grandchildren. And my husband was only fifty-two years old when he died. My baby was under five and there was four of the younguns just tots. It was hard going for me, sometimes we went short, but I never begged for anything. We always made a crop. I never stopped under a thousand cans of food, not counting pickles and jellies, and we had apples in the cellar.

  “And for thirty years I made wreaths for the Farmer's Federation over at Asheville. They'd ship them up North and all around. I'd go up on the Balsams and get my green stuff. I'd hitch up my wagon and team and put the children in and go up into the mountains and gather greens all day long. The Federation furnished me all the wire and materials I needed. I'd get a dollar a wreath.

  “But many's the time I've put it aside to go on a call. One of my boys asked me once, ‘Mama, what if you had a contract for a hundred wreaths and they was due the next morning and you were running short, but someone came asking you to go to a woman whose time had come, what would you do?’ ‘Why, I'd lay them wreaths down,’ I told him. ‘Wreaths can wait. A woman can't.’

  “There's no time in the world like the hour a woman's bringing a baby. There's nothing like somebody coming into the world, a new life. And nobody ever come and knocked on my door and asked me to look a
fter their wife that I didn't go. Snow or rain or cold, it never hurt me to go out in weather when I went on a case. I remember one electric storm, the man led the way up over a high ridge, the thunder was crashing and the lightning was so close the horse would just squat and tremble every time it come. But we made it through all right.

  “One of the hardest and pitifulest places I ever went was to a lumber camp way back there in the Balsams. The man come after me and we rode just about all night before we got to the house, one of those poor little throwed-together lumber shacks and it already full of babies. The woman was having a hard time. I straightened up the house and took care of the children and gave the mother a little quinine in two ounces of castor oil—that's all the medicine I ever gave, and the best doctor I ever waited on showed me about using that if the baby was lingering. But I stayed a week there. I always saw my woman through, no matter how long it took, and there wasn't a scrap to cover the baby's nakedness whenever it did come. So while I waited I had to make it a belly band and some little shirts and gowns. I'd always take flannel in my bag and if they didn't have any fixings, I'd make what they needed. Sometimes I'd take food too, if I knew it to be a place where the folks were in need. There was seven babies I caught in that lumber camp before I was through there.

  “Pay? Once in a while they'd pay me. That wasn't what I went for. At first I charged ten dollars. Later on I asked twenty. But mostly it was just whatever they could give, and I never dunned anybody in my life. They never paid in produce, though, ‘cause usually I had more than they did. I'd be carrying them food.

  “One of the doctors let me read up in his books and after a while I signed up in Raleigh to be a midwife. They sent out somebody to teach us and give us a test. From that time on, I always got my Permit, and with a Grade A on it too. I carried all my necessaries in a denim bag with a drawstring top: washbasin and handbrush, nail file, soap, Lysol, cotton cord tape and dressing, boric acid and eyedrops, two pad covers, four towels, a white coverall apron and cap and the birth certificate and report cards on the mother and baby. It had to all be boiled in disinfectant water and wrapped in clean rags. And I always kept my special dress and slip and shoes and stockings cleaned and ready at hand for me to step right into night or day whenever a call came.”