Listen Here

by Sandra L. Ballard

Baird usually let one of the hikers do the kitchen cutwork in exchange for a meal, but when he had asked around at lunch today no one seemed to need a free dinner bad enough to work for it, so Baird was doing his own culinary prep work. He took care to station himself in the most conspicuous spot in the garden, however, and he kept another chair close at hand in case a volunteer happened along. Baird wasn't much on chopping vegetables, but he was glad of an excuse to sit out in the shade of the oaks and watch the world go by—migrating monarch butterflies or investment bankers in hiking boots: it was all one to him. With the white plastic colander balanced on his knees, Baird Christopher snapped open pea pods to the steady beat of a tune in his head.

  “Need any help?”

  A stout middle-aged man with a red face and a Cornell sweatshirt stood over him, glistening with sweat. “This is the hostel, isn't it?” he asked, wiping his forehead with his sleeve. “That potato farmer in the old green truck said it was.”

  “Potato farmer?”

  “Yeah. Guy in overalls hauling bushel baskets of potatoes in bed of his pickup. He offered me a ride, but I told him I just needed directions to a place to stay. Said to tell you hello. Gordon Somebody, I think he said.”

  “Oh, Gordon” said Baird with bemused smile. “Potato farmer in an old green truck. Right. I'll tell him you said so. He'll be tickled to death.” He chuckled. “Potato farmer.”

  “Well, weren't they potatoes? Or yams, maybe?”

  “Well, they might have been yams, but old Gordon is no potato farmer. He's a cardiologist from Charlotte. Likes to come up here to his summer place and play farmer whenever we can. He'll be thrilled that you mistook him for the genuine article. It'll make his day. Now, what can I do for you?”

  The man mopped his face with a grubby bandana. “I need a bath. Can I get a room for tonight?”

  Baird nodded. “Welcome to the Cosmic Possum Hostel,” he said. “I'm just getting the vegetables ready for tonight's dinner. You can help if you're so inclined.” He removed the paper bag of corn from the second lawn chair and indicated that the man could sit down. “I'm Baird Christopher. I run this place.”

  “By yourself?”

  “More or less. Every so often one of the Trail puppies will take a break for a couple of weeks or months, either to recuperate from an injury or to earn some cash to take them the rest of the way, and I give them a job helping out around the place, but sooner or later, everybody but me moves along. You should have been here last month: The guy working here had been trained as a chef. Used to work at the Four Seasons. He headed out when the weather broke. While it lasted, though, we were eating like kings around here. He even made us call the grits polenta.”

  The hiker sat down in the extra lawn chair, loosened his boot laces, and sighed. “Feels good to sit,” he said. “I'm Stan, but my Trail name is Eeyore. Nice place,” he added, looking approvingly at the gingerbread trim on the covered porch, wreathed by the branches of shade trees. He wasn't sure what kind of trees they were. Trees had never played a big part in Stan's life up until now, but in his last few weeks on the Trail he had begun to feel they were old friends. “It's peaceful here.”

  Baird held a pea pod up to the light and inspected it with the eye of an artist. “There's a serenity about the whole mechanical process of opening pea pods, you know? I was watching the butterflies a little while ago, and I thought: They know what it's like to be inside a pod, only no one helps them break out. They have to do it on their own. Now, with people, some folks break their own pods, and some have to be broken out by others, but it doesn't matter which way you're set free. The important thing is that you emerge—get out there into the great world and seek your destiny.”

  The man blinked. He looked from the colander of peas to the amiable face of his host and back again. After a moment's pause he ventured a guess: “Are you a poet?”

  Baird smiled. “Well, we're all poets, aren't we?”

  Eeyore shrugged. “I'm a mechanical engineer.”

  “Yeah,”said Baird, “but the way I see it, just planting those hiking boots of yours on the Trail is a poem to the unspoiled glory of nature. Where are you headed, friend?”

  “All the way.” Eeyore's face shone with pride. “This is my first time on the southern end of the Trail. I've done short hikes in New England for years now, but this time I'm going to try to make it all the way from Springer to Katahdin.”

  “Georgia to Maine. Sounds like you're breaking out of the pod, friend.” Baird dumped another handful of peas to the strainer. “More power to you.”

  “Ever hiked it yourself?”

  Baird nodded. “Bits and pieces. Mostly North Carolina and Tennessee, and up into Virginia. Pennsylvania is tough going—rocky and steep. Mostly it's a question of time for me—I can't find anybody who'll stay and look after this place for six months while I take off to hike. But you know what Milton said: They also serve who only stand and wait.”

  The stockbroker, to whom English Literature was a never-opened book, nodded politely, wondering if Milton was another local doctor turned potato farmer. He said, “Hiking the Trail is a great experience. I've already lost eighteen pounds. Feel better than I have in years.”

  Baird smiled and went on shelling peas. He had this conversation three times a week, but with every hiker who told him this he tried to share the joy of it as if he was hearing it for the first time. “It's a magical place,” he said. “The Trail through these eastern mountains follows a chain of a green mineral called serpentine that leads from Alabama all the way to New Brunswick, Canada. The chain breaks off at the Atlantic coast, skips the ocean, and then picks up again in Ireland and snakes it way through Cornwall, Wales, and Scotland, till it finally ends in the Arctic Circle. These mountains here once fit on to the tail end of the mountains over there like pieces of a giant continental jigsaw puzzle. The chain of serpentine is a remnant of that togetherness, and it still links us to the mountains of Celtic Britain, where most of our ancestors came from when they settled here. Will the circle be unbroken.”

  “Pretty country,” Eeyore said. “Great views. I hope my photos turn out.”

  “Oh, this country is more than pretty. It's elemental. You know, a hiker from Queensland once told me that the aborigine people of Australia believe that their ancestors sang the world into being, and that there are special song paths that those first people took while they were doing it. Singing up the world from out of nothingness. That hiker said he thought this trail was one of them. That wouldn't surprise me at all. If this was one of the creation roads. A song path.”

  Eeyore shrugged. “I didn't think the AT was that old,” he said carefully. “Government built it. Maybe forty years ago, something like that?”

  “Yes, that's the official word on it, but parts of it follow a much older trail called the Warriors Path. The Indians made that one centuries ago, and they used it for everything from raids on other tribes to trading expeditions.” Baird smiled. “And before that the Ice Age animals made trails over the mountains to the salt pools. Who knows how far back this northbound path stretches? All the way to the serpentine chain, I reckon—and that would make it 250 million years old.”

  “Interesting part of the country. Lots of stories.”

  “Lots of Celtic bloodlines in the people here. Stories is what we do.”

  “Well, I'll be interested to hear some stories. This is my first visit to Appa-lay-chia.”

  Baird said gently, “Well, folks in these parts call it Appa-latch-a.”

  Eeyore shrugged, as if the information did not interest him. “In New York we say Appa-lay-chia.”

  Baird had this conversation rather often, too, and in this round he was less inclined to be charitable. The statement We say it that way back home sounded like a reasonable argument unless you realized that it was not a privilege Easterners granted to anyone other than themselves. If a Texan visiting New York pronounced “Houston Street” the same way that Texans pronounce the name of their city back home, he
would be instantly corrected by a New Yorker, and probably derided for his provincial ignorance. But here in rural America, the privilege of local pronunciation was revoked. Here, if there was any difference of opinion about a pronunciation, Eastern urbanites felt that their way was the correct one, or at least an equally acceptable option. One of Baird Christopher's missions in life was to set arrogant tourists straight about matters like this.

  “You know,” he said to Eeyore, gearing up to his lecture in genial conversational tones. “Over in Northern Ireland once I visited a beautiful walled city that lies east of Donegal and west of Belfast. Now, for the last thousand years or so the Irish people who built that city have called it Derry, a name from darach, which is the Gaelic word for ‘oak tree.’ But the British, who conquered Ireland a few hundred years back, they refer to that same city as Londonderry. One place: two names.

  “If you go to Ireland, and ask for directions to that city, you can call it by either name you choose. Whichever name you say, folks will know where it is you're headed and mostly likely they'll help you get there. But you need to understand this: When you choose what name you call that city—Derry or Londonderry—you are making a political decision. You are telling the people you're talking to which side you are on, what cultural values you hold, and maybe even your religious preference. You are telling some people that they can trust you and other people that they can't. All in one word. One word with a load of signifiers built right in.

  “Now, I reckon Appalachia is a word like that. The way people say it tells us a lot about how they think about us. When we hear somebody say Appa-lay-chia, we know right away that the person we're listening to is not on our side, and we hear a whole lot of cultural nuances about stereotyping and condescension and ethnic bigotry, just built right in. So you go on and call this place Appa-lay-chia if you want to. But you need to know that by doing that you have made a po-li-ti-cal decision, and you'd better be prepared to live with the consequences. Friend.”

  Eeyore blinked at him and took a deep breath. “Ap-pa…latch-ah?” he said.

  “That's right,” said Baird. “Appa-latch-ah. Say it a time or two and you'll get the hang of it. Pretty soon any other way of saying it will grate on your ears.”

  Another long pause. Eeyore peered at his smiling host, who had gone back to shelling peas and humming an Irish dance tune. “Who are you?”

  Baird Christopher smiled. “Why, I'm a Cosmic Possum.”

  JEANNE MCDONALD

  (May 31, 1935–)

  A native of Norfolk, Virginia, Jeanne McDonald graduated from the College of William and Mary with a B.A. in English and had dreams of being a writer. When some of her early stories were rejected, she settled for occasional writing, coupled with marriage, motherhood, and a career teaching high school English. After raising her three children, she returned to the work force as an editor for the University of Tennessee's Center for Business and Economic Research in Knoxville, Tennessee.

  When McDonald signed up for a creative writing class taught by novelist Alan Cheuse at the University of Tennessee, all of her old dreams resurfaced. “I couldn't stop writing,” recalls McDonald. “I stayed up until one or two in the morning, and took notes wherever I was—on the backs of grocery lists or sales receipts. All these stories that had been building for years just came out.”

  In 1989, she won the Alex Haley Literary Fellowship, and in 1995 she was a finalist for the Faulkner Prize. Her stories have appeared in several anthologies, including Worlds in our Words: Contemporary American Women Writers (1996) and Homeworks (1996). McDonald and her second husband, journalist Fred Brown, have collaborated on two nonfiction works, Growing Up Southern: How the South Shapes Its Writers, and The Serpent Handlers: Three Families and Their Faith. Her first novel, Water Dreams, is to be published in 2003 by the University Press of Mississippi.

  “The settings for my stories are often the East Coast,” says McDonald, “but the special rhythms of the Appalachian language, and the unabashed humility and humor of the people have drawn me to write more and more about this region.”

  In the following excerpt from her essay “Up the Hill toward Home,” McDonald relates her experiences as a volunteer with a mental health program that assisted patients in gaining independence.

  OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE

  PRIMARY

  Novel: Water Dreams (2003). Nonfiction: The Serpent Handlers: Three Famdies and Their Faith (2000), co-author with Fred Brown. Growing Up Southern: How the South Shapes Its Writers (1997), co-author with Fred Brown. Autobiographical essay: “Fantasy Meets Reality: Ah, the glamour of a book tour,” Metro Pulse [Knoxville, TN] (31 August 2000), 23, 30.

  SECONDARY

  Jenny Nash, “You Never Know” [Interview / profile], Tennessee Alumnus (spring 1996), 29–31.

  BREATHING THE SAME AIR: AN EAST TENNESSEE ANTHOLOGY (2001)

  from Up the Hill toward Home

  This is a story I've needed to tell for a long time, one that has rolled around in my mind for years now. In many ways it seems like a sad story, but finally I have realized that it has as happy an ending as possible under the circumstances, that it is really a saga of bravery and resilience and just plain determination. It's the story of Mildred Hale, a woman who kept fighting for her life under the most adverse circumstances—parents killed when she was a child, mental breakdown in young adulthood, thirty years in a state mental institution, and then, in the last twenty years of her life the slow, late blooming of the inner woman she had always been meant to be. But there wasn't enough time to reclaim the first sixty years of her life.

  Mildred died in 1996, at the age of 84, having lived a long life, some might say, but one that was virtually lost to her because, for most of it, she lived under the influence of numbing medications, terrifying electroshock therapy, and nightmarish phobias. At the end of her life, she lived alone, and that's how she died. Alone. Knowing how frightened she must have been, I've asked myself over and over if I could have done something to save her. I remember my telephone ringing just once that night, in the small dark hours. I didn't realize until a couple of days later that it must have been Mildred.

  Mildred was what some people would call a “character.” Anyone who saw her walking unsteadily along the street, wearing her polyester dresses and Indian moccasins, with her tightly-waved hair and an overabundance of bright and glittering costume jewelry, would think her odd, to say the least. But to me she was a heroine, because in a sense she was symbolic of millions of people in this country who are mentally ill, whose everyday lives are mired in fear, anxiety, and paranoia, and who, like Mildred, find even the simplest everyday acts painful—even impossible—to perform. Mildred was afraid to look anyone directly in the eye, as if in surrendering herself that way, she would somehow be swept away. She was frightened of new people, new places. She refused even to meet my new husband. And because she feared going to a beauty salon, for fifteen years I gave her home permanents in her apartment, twice a year—June and December. That was her schedule, not mine. Always, on those occasions, she would press a five- or ten-dollar bill into my hand for payment. When I gave it back, she would swear by “hell's fire” in her gravelly, cigarette-tainted voice that she would never speak to me again if I didn't take it. Of course she didn't mean it.

  Mildred lived in a squalid apartment with hand-me-down furniture because her Social Security income couldn't buy her anything better. As her eyesight failed, the place became filthy because she couldn't see to clean. Sometimes church volunteers came in and washed floors and curtains and struggled with stains in the bathroom, but finally, they seemed to give up. Roaches, unnoticed by Mildred, scurried boldly in her refrigerator, and at the end of each of my visits, she would insist I take something home for the children. She would reach into the refrigerator and give me uncovered pieces of cake or pie, which I accepted so as not to injure her feelings, but tossed into the garbage once I got home. When mice invaded her apartment, Mildred stuffed steel wool under the mold
ing to keep them out. Plants died on her windowsills and she didn't notice. Friends did her washing, and once I offered to pay for maids to clean her apartment, but she didn't want strangers there, and anyway, they would probably have left immediately when they saw the odds they would be facing.

  Over the years Mildred gained the confidence to walk to the bank and the grocery store, where she made friends who helped her balance her account or find things on grocery shelves, and there was always someone in the neighborhood who would notice her struggling up the hill toward home and stop to offer her a ride.

  There were happy moments, too. She loved her cigarettes, Moon Pies, Goo-Goo Clusters, chocolate-covered cherries, watching “The Price Is Right” on television, and listening to Red Foley and country music on the radio. She cherished letters and cards from friends and relatives back in West Tennessee, and she loved it when I brought my children to visit. This was Mildred's life, and it mirrored the anguished existence of millions of others like her, not only in East Tennessee, but in the entire country. Like Mildred, most of these victims have to rely on the mercy of social services, state and federal programs, and public agencies. Theirs is a life of waiting for help—in hospitals, in offices of doctors who serve the indigent, and in city and county agencies, always at the mercy of time and the people who are meant to assist them.

  I first met Mildred back in 1977, when the government was slashing federal expenditures and one of the solutions was to dump people out of state mental hospitals and into the unforgiving streets of mainstream American life. Mental health officials tried to alleviate some of the trauma by setting up a program called “Community Friends,” which called on citizens to help patients become acclimated to living in an open and unprotected environment—in short, the real world. The plan was to help them find housing, teach them how to open bank accounts and write checks, and show them how to buy groceries—basically, to set up a support system to which they could turn for help.