The Road From Gap Creek: A Novel Hardcover

by Robert Morgan

  “I just can’t believe it,” Amy said and patted her hair. “It’s all so pretty.”

  One of the things that struck me was how different the river looked if you was in the middle of it. Looking up at the trees and the mountains beyond I’m not sure I would have recognized the scene if I didn’t already know where I was. By us being out on the river everything looked strange. I’d never seen anything prettier than the clear water with leaves floating and more falling. I guess the fact that it all seemed so strange made it even prettier.

  When we bumped against a log Amy screamed and then laughed. The water was perfectly clear, and you could see the rocks on the bottom. I watched a crawfish in the sand behind a rock, and then this big shadow shot by and I caught the flash of a silver rainbow side. A muskrat slid into the river and shot out of sight.

  “Let’s go down to the shoals,” Troy said.

  “No,” I said, and giggled. “We’ll tip over or hit the rocks and be drowneded.”

  “Got to run the rapids,” Troy said, and laughed.

  The river slowed for a long quiet stretch under the birch trees. Except for the splash of the paddle and settling of leaves on the water, there was no noise. Leaves fell in the river, and one fell in Amy’s hair. She picked it out and held the leaf, looking at the pretty golden color.

  I could have set out there on the river for hours, maybe forever. I’d never seen anything as peaceful as that stretch of still water with the leaves rocking down and the blue sky beyond. The world and all its troubles, the Depression and meanness and sickness, seemed too far away to remember. Breadlines and riots and Roosevelt seemed to belong to another world entirely. “Let’s just stay out here,” I said.

  Suddenly there was an explosion on the water head of us. There was splashing and swooshing and all these wings flapping. It was a bunch of ducks taking off from the water. They must have been drifting on the river so still even Troy hadn’t seen them, and Old Pat hadn’t heard them or smelled them. Their wings seemed to burn and beat the air as they flew up through the trees. Old Pat was as surprised as any of us, and she put her paw on the side of the canoe. The canoe was rounded on the bottom and the least little thing could roll it over. Old Pat put all her weight on that side and jumped into the water. She was so heavy that before I knowed it the canoe tipped and flipped over and we all fell into the river.

  The cold was a shock that made me gasp. Water hit my face and went right through my clothes. I held on to the paddle and started to swim. But the river wasn’t deep there. It was only up to my waist. And then I heard Amy screaming. I didn’t know if she’d ever been swimming or not, but the cold water scared her and she cried like a baby that had been smacked.

  “Hold the canoe,” Troy called to me. He started wading toward Amy and I grabbed the canoe, throwed the paddle in it, and pushed it toward the bank.

  “The water ain’t deep,” Troy said to Amy. He took her by the arm and led her to the shallows. Her dress was pressed against her chest and her hair was ruined. She kept crying and Troy patted her on the back. Old Pat had run after the ducks, but they’d flown away. She come back and stood dripping on the bank, watching us.

  “Ain’t we a pretty sight,” Troy said. He looked Amy in the face and she quit crying and smiled at him. In the sunlight Troy’s curly red hair gleamed like fine copper spun into silk. “You won’t ever forget this Sunday,” Troy said, and laughed.

  BEFORE TROY GRADUATED from high school he was give a letter for playing basketball. It was a big pretty letter, fuzzy as sheepskin with a blue backing, but he couldn’t afford a jacket to put it on. He laid the letter on the mantel where everybody could see it. He couldn’t afford a suit for graduation and had to borrow some slacks for the ceremony. Troy had growed too tall to wear any of Papa’s or Velmer’s clothes.

  The summer of 1933 after Troy graduated things got even worse than they had been. There was not a job to be had in all the county. Rich people had quit building houses on the lake, and Papa and Velmer couldn’t find any more work. Papa had lost the two hundred dollars he had in the bank when it closed. There was a new president in Washington, but things got harder rather than better.

  Velmer had made a little money trapping muskrats and minks that winter, but once the trapping season was over he had no way to make another cent. Papa sawed down dead chestnut trees and hewed cross ties for the railroad. The chestnuts had all died in the blight of 1924, and the dead trunks stood around everywhere on the mountain. It took Papa all day to make a good cross tie, and when he hauled it to the depot he got seventy-five cents or sometimes only fifty cents. Nobody could explain where the money had all gone. There was plenty of things in the stores to buy but no money to buy them with.

  Only one in the family that could find a job was me. I’d put on a little lipstick and my best dress and got a ride to town and found the job as a clerk at the dime store. It paid a dollar fifty a day, or nine dollars for a six-day week. I got a room at a boardinghouse on Church Street and come home on Saturday night if I could get a ride, and returned to town early Monday morning. The boardinghouse cost me five dollars a week, and I give Mama three dollars every weekend. That left me one dollar a week for spending money, so I couldn’t save much.

  That three dollars a week I give Mama was all she had to buy groceries, except the money she got at the store for butter and eggs. With that money she bought coffee and sugar, salt and flour, the things she couldn’t grow. When there was no sugar she used molasses for sweetening, or honey if she had any. I don’t reckon Mama had had a new dress for years that wasn’t made out of a feed sack. In winter she wore the same old coat she’d always wore.

  Troy had graduated and he was a star basketball player, but he couldn’t find a job nowhere. He was tall and good looking and popular, but there was no opportunity for him. He worked in the fields, and he caught trout for dinner. He drawed more pictures and took some up town where they sold art supplies, and I think he sold two pictures for a dollar each. When cold weather come he set rabbit gums in the pasture and caught rabbits and possums, which he sometimes sold at the cotton-mill store for a quarter each. There was plenty of mill hands happy to buy a rabbit or possum for their dinner.

  But in the worst times us people in the country was lucky because we could raise enough stuff to eat. When the garden was in we eat fresh peas and beans, corn and squash, new taters, okra, lima beans, and peppers. We dried apples and canned peaches and made jelly and preserves. Canned blackberries was good. And after a hog was killed you had ribs and tenderloin, souse meat, sausage and ham, and streaked bacon. You had eggs and chicken for Sunday dinner. All through the winter you had grits and mush and sweet taters, when you didn’t have nothing else.

  The leanest time was late winter and early spring, after the hog meat run out and the taters was getting dried up and wrinkly in the cellar. In the spring you started craving meat and something fresh. You thought about bacon and ham and roastnears. If you was lucky you had soup beans left or maybe crowder peas.

  That’s when you went out along the edge of the woods looking for pokeweed sprouts. Pokeweed was tender when it first come up and if you washed it and boiled it and sprinkled vinegar and slices of boiled egg on it, it was mighty good, with a special tang all its own. It was poison if you eat it raw.

  Even better was creasy greens, or wild mustard, which you gathered along the lower edge of the field along the river. You boiled them and put vinegar on them and it was like a tonic to tune your system, a taste of the fresh new season and the summer ahead, full of all the minerals from the soil. Papa said it was the minerals, the salts and metals extracted by roots into plants, that made us healthy, give us strong bones and rich blood.

  Some of the old-timers used to eat dirt every spring to stimulate and nourish their systems. Well, it wasn’t dirt exactly, it was white or gray branch clay, pipe clay Papa called it. Every March Papa would go down to the bank of the branch where the clay was exposed and clean away a place and take about a spoon
ful of buttery clay. He’d eat that and wash it down with coffee. He said it would thin his blood in spring after the long winter. Him and Mama both would eat a little clay every year, but none of us younguns would.

  Effie had got a job as a maid in one of the houses at Flat Rock. I don’t think they paid her anything but her board and maybe a dollar a week. She’d come home about once a month if she could find a ride, but she never did have enough money to help Mama and Papa out. She had broke her glasses and it took everything she had to buy new ones.

  I don’t know when it was that we first heard about the CCC. It was one of the programs President Roosevelt started to help people get back to work. We may have read about it in the paper, or maybe one of Troy’s friends told him about it. But one Sunday when I was home Troy showed me this pamphlet describing the program. It sounded a little like you was going into the army. You lived in barracks and did athletics every morning. Boys that joined worked at making roads and bridges, planting trees, filling in gullies, building parks and recreation sites. Some worked in the high mountains building scenic highways. Others worked on the sea coast planting grass on dunes, building boardwalks at parks. Troy said if you went into the CCC they paid you thirty dollars a month, but most of that was sent home to your family and you was left with a few dollars of spending money. It was the best way he could help Papa and Mama.

  The pamphlet said there would be classes taught to the boys in the CCC. Skills such as welding, carpentry, and mechanics would be taught, and basic subjects like English and math for those that hadn’t graduated from high school. And some camps would offer instruction in bookkeeping, typing, and even accounting. The whole idea was to give the boys a job and help prepare them for the future.

  Troy had never lived away from home and I could tell he was excited and nervous about going to the CCC. He’d filled out the application and been accepted and was waiting to be called to town to meet the truck that would take him to the camp somewhere in the mountains north of Brevard. He was told to carry very little because they would provide work clothes at the camp. Sometimes on Saturday night there would be parties and dances where people from town could come, but no fancy clothes would be needed.

  “I’m going to miss Old Pat,” Troy said. He called the dog to him and stroked her head and the back of her neck.

  “Not as much as she’ll miss you,” I said.

  “Wish they’d let me take her to the camp,” he said.

  It took about three months for Troy to be called to the CCC. So many boys had joined, so many was out of work all over the country, it took a while to get all the camps set up to accommodate them. Clothes had to be made, barracks finished, instructors and foremen trained. The newspaper said army officers that had been retired or let out of the service would be running most of the camps. There would be some drills and inspections just like in the army.

  When Troy finally got the letter telling him to report, it was late winter. The first green was showing on the poplars along the branch. At a distance the maples looked like red mist. It was plowing time and that week him and Velmer was going to drag-harrow the fields. Troy was to report in town on Sunday evening with just a bag with a few clothes. He’d got a ride to town with the McCalls whose boy Jake was also going into the CCC.

  I was at home that Sunday and helped Mama fix dinner. After we washed the dishes I stood on the porch with Troy and Old Pat, waiting for the McCalls to come. Troy had packed his underwear and toothbrush and shaving stuff, along with a sketch pad and pencils, in a brown paper bag. That was all he was taking. “They’ll give me everything else I need,” he said.

  Old Pat could tell that something was about to happen. Maybe she even sensed that Troy was leaving. She paced back and forth on the porch, and then she run down the steps and back up. “Here, old girl,” Troy called. She come to him and Troy patted her on the head and stroked her ears.

  When the McCall car stopped in front of the house Old Pat whimpered and yelped at it. Troy give me a hug and patted the dog, and when Mama come out on the porch he give her a hug. And then he took his paper bag and dashed to the car. As they drove away Old Pat stood in the yard and watched the car disappear around the bend. She yelped and whined and then run after the car.

  Later she come back and laid down on the porch where Troy had stood, and whined and groaned. I tried to get her to go for a walk down to the river, but she wouldn’t go. That night she just laid there on the porch and groaned and whined, like her heart was broke. I never seen a dog grieve so. I guess for Old Pat nothing made sense unless Troy was around. That was all she understood.

  In the days after Troy left for the CCC Old Pat would go off into the woods and be gone for hours. Once I found her in the barn loft laying beside the canoe. And sometimes she’d lay in the sun on the steps to the road where Troy had got in the McCalls car, like she expected him to reappear right where he had disappeared.

  But Old Pat got closer to me in the months after Troy left. When I was home she’d follow me around and hardly let me out of her sight. I was not Troy, but maybe I was the next best thing. I bought her a new collar at the dime store and sometimes I brought home a can of sardines for her. She liked sardines as much as a cat does.

  Eleven

  Next Sunday morning Mama said she wouldn’t be going to church. That surprised me because Mama always went to church every Sunday for as long as I could remember. She went to church on Gap Creek till just before Troy was born. Only times I could remember that she didn’t go to church on Sunday was when she was sick with the flu and when we was quarantined because Velmer had typhoid.

  “Mama, don’t you want to go to preaching?” I said.

  “I’ll stay home today.”

  “Why don’t you want to go?”

  “Because everybody will come up to me and talk about Troy.”

  Mama was a quiet person, but when she made up her mind there was no use to argue with her. She’d do what she thought it was right to do. The way she’d decided so certain made me wonder if it was wrong for the rest of us to go to church. Maybe it was not fitting for people grieving to go to service as usual. On the other hand, maybe it was just the thing to do, to show how everything was in the hands of the Lord.

  Muir and me got ready to go, and Papa said he was going. Papa was a deacon and he liked to set up front on the right side of the church with the other deacons, in what was called the Amen Corner. A lot of people had expected Muir to become the pastor, but that was another story, and one he didn’t like to remember. When they’d been considering a new pastor there had been such an argument over doctrine and Baptist discipline that Muir had give it up and said he didn’t expect to ever preach there.

  Sharon come back down that weekend, and she’d bought a new suit, maybe expecting to wear it to a funeral. It was gray and tight waisted and looked a little too fancy for a country church. She had new shoes too, and a dark purple hat, with gloves and purse to match. “You look awful pretty,” I said when she come out of the bedroom.

  “It’s good to be respectful of the Lord’s house,” she said.

  And it’s good to be noticed, I could have said, but I didn’t. It was Sunday, a day to hold your tongue. Now that the bedroom was free I went there to put on my black dress with the lace around the square neck. I’d carried it up from the Powell house, not wanting to wear good clothes as I crossed the pasture and climbed through barbed-wire fences. It was the only black dress I had and I figured this was a good time to wear it. I put a touch of red on my lips.

  Muir had always loved to dress up whenever there was an occasion. When we was courting he would sometimes wear his riding boots and tight plaid jacket just to go on picnics or go to Asheville for lunch at Grove Park Inn. But Sundays he liked to wear one of his two suits, a blue serge and a gray herringbone. The gray suit was the one he liked to preach in, when he did have an invitation to preach. I was glad he didn’t preach too often, because he never could sleep before he was supposed to preach, and then he�
�d worry for days after he preached if he’d said the right thing or left out important points. I never mentioned his preaching because it made him sad that he wasn’t asked to conduct many services, since the war started.

  Velmer did have a suit, but it must have been in Columbia or packed away with his and Aleen’s things. Some of their stuff had been left with Aleen’s family when she went off to work in Washington, D.C. Velmer was wearing his clean khakis.

  The church was so close we walked out the road past the garden and the woods where Troy had left his cot, past the field where the old schoolhouse had stood. Before we got to the church steps people stopped us to say how sorry they was to hear about Troy. Florrie Stepp wiped tears from her eyes and said she always thought Troy was the finest boy the community had produced. She was Muir’s aunt, and before we was married she’d tried to persuade Muir that I was the wrong girl for him. He told me she said I was lazy and the worst flirt in the whole county. But Muir hadn’t paid no attention, and I never let on to her I knowed what she’d tried to do.

  “Just let me know if there’s anything I can do to help,” people said. I know they meant well, but I wondered just what they had in mind that they could do, if they had anything in mind except just saying the usual thing. We’d not come in time for Sunday school, and the singing had just started. I took my seat with the women on the left side at front and Papa and Muir joined the deacons in the Amen Corner. Velmer never did pray in church. He always set about halfway back on the right side of the congregation.

  When the collection plate was passed I put in a fifty-cent piece, which was all I had. It was best to give something. I always felt better when I give something to the church. After the offertory hymn was over it was the usual time for the preacher to get up and make announcements. If there was some special event like an upcoming revival he would mention that. If people had asked for special prayers he would mention that and give the names of bereaved families.