The Road From Gap Creek: A Novel Hardcover

by Robert Morgan

  “When a bomber crashes they try to save the bombsight,” Clarence said. “I’ve read that’s the most valuable thing on the plane.”

  “When a bomber crashes there’s not much left to save,” Ancell said. “The bombs go off, and the fuel tanks, and everything burns up. Even dog tags get melted.”

  Sharon stood up so sudden her chair fell over behind her with a crash. “You all are a bunch of vultures,” she said, her voice rising to a high pitch. “You can’t get enough of the horrors. You feed on it and wallow in it like a dog does with carrion. I’m sick of it.” She turned and run into the back bedroom. Everybody at the table set quiet after she left. Finally Mama said, “Would anybody like some coconut cake?”

  AFTER WE’D FINISHED eating Sharon had still not come out of the bedroom. I helped Mama clean the table and put the leftovers in the icebox and bread safe. The kettle on the stove was already hot and Mama washed the dishes while Gladys and me dried them. When I throwed the dishwater out into the backyard I seen the sky was darker, like it was going to rain.

  “Was Troy and Sharon married?” Gladys said when I come back in.

  “Only engaged,” I said.

  “That’s what I thought,” Gladys said.

  At just that moment Sharon appeared at the door from the dining room. “I’m freezing,” she said.

  “I bet you are,” Mama said. “Here, stand by the stove and get warm.”

  “Let me pour you some coffee,” I said.

  “I’ll just stand here until I thaw out,” Sharon said. “It’s icy in that bedroom.” She was trying to act cheerful, like her outburst had never occurred. I’d always noticed that people that get mad and tell everybody off soon get over what bothers them.

  “Maybe you ought to go set by the fire,” I said.

  Papa and the cousins and Muir and Velmer was setting around the fireplace in the living room talking about Roosevelt and how he ruined the country and got us into the war.

  “Going to war was the only way he could make people forget the mess he’d made,” Ancell said.

  “He never was able to help the farmers,” Papa said.

  “He started the CCC,” Muir said. “Many people think that was good.”

  “I think the CCC was just a way of getting thousands of boys ready to go into the army,” Clarence said. “I’ve heard soldiers say that what they learned in the CCC has made life in the army seem easy.”

  I was stacking plates on the shelf when I heard another car stop outside. Mama stood at the window and said, “Why, it’s Lou and Garland.” A thrill flashed through me for none of Mama’s family had come to see her yet. Most of them didn’t have any way of coming. But if there was anybody who could cheer Mama up it was Lou. Since they was girls they’d worked together and laughed together and teased each other.

  I stepped out on the back porch and called out to Lou and Garland as they got out of the Model A Ford pickup. “I’m mighty glad to see you,” I said.

  Aunt Lou come up the steps and said in a low voice, “How’s Julie?”

  “She has been quiet, like she’s just thinking about things.”

  “That’s her way, to brood over a thing,” Lou said.

  Garland reached the steps and give me a hug. “How’s my favorite girl?” he said. I could smell whiskey on his breath. He’d took a dram before he got out of the truck. I reckon he needed a drink before visiting in-laws at such a bad time. Garland made pokeberry wine for his rheumatism, claiming it was the only thing that kept his joints from swelling up. Him and Papa used to drink together, before Papa quit, about the time I was born.

  “I almost forgot the pie,” Lou said. She hurried back to the truck and returned with a cake box. I could smell the lemony meringue in the cold air.

  “I think it’s about to snow,” Garland said looking up at the sky. “The clouds have what we used to call snow light.”

  “Come on in before you freeze,” I said. Seeing Lou and Garland made me feel better than anything had that day. They was the kind of people that whenever they entered a room people cheered up. I don’t know what it was; it was like some kind of feeling they give off.

  Lou walked into the kitchen and give Mama a hug. “I come to see if you was behaving yourself,” she said. Mama didn’t answer, which was unusual since her and Lou liked to make teasing remarks.

  “Brought you a pie,” Lou said, and put the box down on the table.

  Papa heard Lou and Garland come in and he greeted them at the door to the living room. “You never know what the cat’ll drag in,” he said.

  “Got to be nice to in-laws whether you like them or not,” Garland said, and punched Papa lightly on the shoulder.

  “How are you, Hank?” Lou said, and give Papa a hug.

  “You know me, same old sixes and sevens.”

  As I watched Lou and Garland shaking hands and chatting and laughing with everybody it come to me how important acting was. What Lou and Garland was doing was acting. There was no way they could actually feel so light and cheerful coming to a place of bereavement at such an awful time. But instead of acting mournful and quiet, as would be natural, they knowed how to be lively and full of affection and humor. They hugged people and made teasing comments, like everything was all right and it was a happy get-together. It come to me that most of the smart things people do are a kind of playacting. It would be awful to just act the way we feel. Better to behave for a purpose, with good sense. Use our minds and not just our feelings of the moment. Act the way you need to. It was something I’d thought about before but never seen so clear.

  “I think it’s going to snow,” Lou said. “That’s why I told Garland to bring his chains. I told him I wouldn’t come a step if he didn’t bring the chains.”

  “It’s too early to snow,” Gladys said.

  “Not that early; it’s almost Thanksgiving,” Ancell said.

  “It’ll be hard to have Thanksgiving this year,” Sharon said.

  “Indeed it will,” Garland said, and nodded.

  “It’s almost deer hunting season,” Velmer said. “The problem will be to get ammunition.”

  “There’s people that has hoarded ammunition,” Clarence said. “I know somebody at Enka that has bought a hundred boxes before the war started.”

  “Look, it’s raining,” Lou said, and pointed to drops running down the window.

  “I hope it don’t freeze,” Garland said.

  I stepped to the window and seen the fine drops making dark spots on the edge of the porch and on the steps. I couldn’t see the drops fall, only the dark dots appear, and new ones filling in the space between other spots. Soon the boards and steps was wet and the boxwoods by the road shined with drops on their tiny leaves.

  “If the roads freeze we may have to stay here,” Lou said. “Never thought you’d have so many people to feed,” she said to Mama.

  “We’ve got plenty of can stuff and taters in the cellar,” Mama said.

  “And a hog in the pen that’s ready to be killed,” Papa said.

  “They predict more snow this year than usual,” Ancell said.

  “I’ve heard things the government shoots up in the air can make it snow,” Helen said.

  “What could you shoot up in the air to make it snow?” Clarence said.

  “That’s just what I heard,” Helen said.

  “The government is always tampering with something,” Ancell said.

  “The government is always tampering with people’s lives,” Sharon said.

  “People ought to have patriotism and serve their country the way Troy did,” Gladys said.

  “There’s not much patriotism anymore,” Ancell said, “just when we need it.”

  “Patriotism gets you killed,” Sharon said.

  “What we need now is some Americanism,” Ancell said. “We spend our money and our lives helping other people instead of ourselves. If we had a little Americanism we might do better.”

  “Look,” Garland said, and pointed to the window.
“It’s snowing.”

  I didn’t see nothing at first when I looked out over the front porch to the road. And then I seen what seemed like flies or little moths flourishing over the shrubbery and in front of the dark hemlocks. It had been raining, but now the flakes was replacing the drops. It must have been getting colder. The rain was turning into snow. As I looked across the road to the field beyond I seen the air was now filled with flitting things, like mayflies hatching above a stream. The sky was falling in flakes that swung and rocked and playfully dodged each other like swarming butterflies. Even as I watched, the road begun to turn white and the hemlocks appeared to be catching thistledown. Flakes big as butterflies fell past the porch, and then the flakes got smaller and was steady.

  “How will we ever get back to Asheville?” Ancell said.

  “I’m glad I brought my chains,” Garland said.

  “And I’m glad you thought of it,” Lou said, and giggled.

  “Would anybody else like some fresh coffee and lemon pie?” Mama said.

  Twelve

  When Troy come home from the CCC after a year, he had a few weeks of leave before he went back to the camp. He’d signed up for another year of work on the road high in the mountains. Troy never had told us exactly what he done in the CCC until he wrote in a letter near the end of his first year and said that he’d been trained as a powder man. That meant he was in charge of the dynamite. Where they was blasting away rocks to make the road, men drilled holes into the rock. It was Troy’s job to place sticks of dynamite in the holes and set caps on them attached to a fuse. The cap was like a big firecracker, and when the fire reached the cap and made it go off, that shook the dynamite and made it explode.

  The other way to set off dynamite was through a long electric wire. The cap was then set off by a spark of electricity. You could send the spark either from a battery or from a box that worked like a generator when you pushed down hard on the handle. Handling dynamite was the most dangerous job in the CCC. I’m sure they assigned the work to Troy because he was so calm and careful. If Mama had knowed that’s what he was doing she’d have been worried sick. I guess that’s why he told us only after he’d almost finished the first year.

  Velmer said dynamite would go off if you dropped it or hit it with something. He said lightning or some other electric charge could set it off. He said when you was handling dynamite you had only one chance to make a mistake. There wouldn’t be a second chance.

  Troy was coming home on Saturday while I was working in the dime store. So I wouldn’t get a chance to see how happy Mama and Papa and Old Pat was when he arrived with his duffel bag. Troy said that on Saturday evening he’d take Papa’s Model A truck and drive to town to bring me home for the weekend. I was excited all week knowing Troy was coming home, and on Saturday I couldn’t hardly wait for work to be over at six. Finally when they locked the doors and dimmed the lights I run to the back room where clerks kept their stuff and got my purse and my bag of clothes. Wilson the manager seen I was in a hurry and said, “Did you clean up your counter?” We was supposed to clean up our work space before we left every day.

  “I cleaned it up,” I said.

  “Let’s just have a look,” Wilson said. I hurried after him carrying my bag. I’d cleaned my glass display cases and swept the floor behind the counter, but I’d left a stack of paper bags on top of the counter. “Look at that, Annie,” he said. “That won’t do.” I quickly placed the bags on a shelf under the counter.

  “If you’re in too big a hurry to do the job right, others are waiting to take it,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  When I finally got outside I seen Troy parked just down the street and Old Pat was in the back of the truck. I turned in that direction and almost run into somebody. “Why, hey there, Annie,” they said.

  It was Mike Caldwell, the boy I knowed from South Carolina. I’d only gone out with him a few times and then stopped seeing him. “What a surprise,” he said.

  “How are you?” I said. I started to edge away, but he took me by the arm.

  “I’m so glad to see you,” he said. “Why don’t we go and get some ice cream?” Mike Caldwell was a nice boy and his family owned a Ford dealership in Traveler’s Rest. He always had a new Ford to drive and he was handsome. But as much as I wanted to like him I just never could. I didn’t know why.

  “Troy is waiting for me,” I said. “He’s been away in the CCC a whole year.” I started backing away.

  “We can all go for ice cream,” Mike Caldwell said. I could see that he’d drove all the way from Traveler’s Rest just to meet me when I got off from work and pretended it was a coincidence. It was like him to do a thing like that. Maybe it was because he was so nice and forgiving that I couldn’t like him. I know that sounds awful. I hated to hurt his feelings. He started to follow me toward the truck.

  Just then I heard Troy say, “No, Old Pat,” and out of the corner of my eye I seen the dog jump out of the truck bed and gallop toward me. Everybody on the street turned to look and Mike Caldwell froze where he was. When Old Pat got to me I took her by the collar and led her back to the truck. Troy got out and opened the door for me to get in. I was happy to see Troy and I was happy Old Pat had saved me from having to say anything else to Mike Caldwell.

  HAVING TROY AT home after a year was like a vacation for all of us. It seemed like a new start in life somehow. We walked down to the river and had picnics at the Jim Lee Shoals. Because I had to work in the dime store, I only seen him on weekends so I didn’t go on most of his trips. One Sunday we drove to Asheville to visit Papa’s cousins there. We went swimming in the lake and drove Mama up to Mount Olivet to see the place where she was born and raised. Often there was one of my friends coming along just to be close to Troy.

  I told Troy he was lucky to be alive, working all year with dynamite. “I may have the easiest job in the CCC,” he said, and laughed. He said dynamite was safe as sticks of peppermint candy if you obeyed the rules. “The first rule is never to be in a hurry,” he said.

  For three months there’d been a class in drawing taught at the CCC camp. The instructor was a professor of art from the University of North Carolina that had been let go because of the Depression. In the class they’d drawed from a model and from nature. Troy said that teacher had taught him a lot about perspective, about depth in pictures, and how to model with shading. To his surprise Troy had a lot of time for drawing in the CCC camp. After work and on weekends when most of the boys just loafed, or played Ping-Pong or poker, or sometimes slipped away to town, he took his pencils and pad, or his box of paints, to the recreation center where there was a kind of library and worked until the lights went out. He painted pictures of the boys in the camp and animals like deer they seen in the woods. But mostly he painted pictures of the mountains, of Pisgah Mountain, and Horsepen Gap, of Looking Glass Mountain. He painted pictures of the Pink Beds, the meadows of phlox in bloom, and the slopes of mountain laurel in bloom. He had painted waterfalls so tall they disappeared in mist at the bottom. He painted a black bear that come into the camp to eat garbage. There was a picture of a dynamite explosion, with dust and rocks flying every which way off the side of a cliff.

  Mama had saved most of the money the CCC had sent home, and she give it to Troy to buy new clothes. He only took fifty dollars and he bought presents for everybody and a new set of paints. He took some of his pictures up town to Baker’s art supply store and they put them in the window where people could see them.

  Because of the pictures in the store window there was even a little piece in the paper about Troy and his paintings. The article said he was serving in the CCC and he was a graduate of the county high school. There was a photograph of him and Old Pat that must have been took by the reporter. Girls that I worked with asked me if I would introduce them to my brother.

  It was because of the article in the paper that the woman named Mrs. Ellen Anhalt wrote to Troy while he was at home. The Anhalts had retired from som
e place up north in New York State and built a house on Cabin Creek. Though the house was made of logs, it was a big fancy house. Before there was electricity in the valley they had their own generator.

  The Anhalts didn’t have much to do with the local people, though they was friendly enough when you seen them. They went to church in town and had friends in town, but they sometimes bought milk and butter from their neighbors. Mrs. Anhalt’s sister had come from up north to live with them. About two or three years ago Mr. Anhalt had died. And about a year after that the sister had died and Ellen Anhalt was left alone in the big log house.

  It was the same year Troy went into the CCC that we heard Mrs. Anhalt had had the bodies of her husband and sister dug up to be sent back north to be buried among their kin there. Joe Williams had been one of the men hired to dig up the caskets from the local cemetery on the hill above Cabin Creek. But Mrs. Anhalt herself had not gone back to New York State.

  When I come home on Saturday I read the letter Mrs. Anhalt had sent to Troy. It was typed on fine business-size paper.

  Dear Troy Richards,

  I have seen your pictures in the window of Baker’s store and I am impressed by your talent and accomplishment. I am proud to have such an artist from our Green River valley.

  The reason I am writing is that I would like to commission you to paint portraits of my late husband, Arnold Anhalt, and my sister, Mertis Edwards. They have both passed away and I would like to have life-size portraits of them. I can provide you with photographs for you to work from.

  I am also interested in purchasing some of your landscapes for my parlor. Could you visit me this Sunday and bring some of your paintings also?

  Sincerely yours,

  Ellen Anhalt