The Pritchett Century

by V. S. Pritchett

  We pelted into N———, galloped in like mountaineer horsemen and reined in sharply at Jenkins’s store. N——— is highly set, like a pool on a mountain summit. There is a low, surrounding ridge of woods and the village itself has twenty timber shacks of all kinds, and about fifty-three inhabitants, including children. Of these, all the men sit on the platform of Jenkins’s store, accompanied by “Zeb” Jenkins, and wait for the daily train to arrive.

  I remember the men, fifteen of them, taller than corn, but scarcely stouter, wearing blue overalls and wide black hats, with brims flapped this way and that with the challenging nonchalance of raven’s wings. There were no exceptions; each man wore blue overalls and a black hat. Each man was thin and nasal, drawling to canny length, with a startling amount of bone, with a reach as long as the dawn.

  Each man had blue eyes and fair hair. It was as though these mountaineers were wearing a uniform, and my sensations were like those of Rip Van Winkle when he came upon the Dutchmen. As I watched these fifteen men, long and thin as turnpikes, looking wordlessly at me, and with their idle lengths of leg hung over the platform of the store, a fear seized me that by a general conspiracy of men, trains and blue mountains I had been thrown into an outlaw stronghold, and that the outlaws were just taking their time.

  I found myself listening for their thoughts, trying to meet their spare blue gaze. But impossible. The main thoroughfare of N——— was the railway track, by which stood a few shacks and a sawmill, and as I turned back to escape this way I could feel that fifteen black hats, cocked at all angles of defiance, had turned with me, that thirty blue eyes turned and perforated me; and that the silence was refining to its ultimate frigidity. Oh, for a stout man!

  As though answering, a rotund fellow came from behind a wagon and smiled at me, seized me and undertook my defense, strode over railway tracks and fields, gave me a bed for the night, and fed me on corn bread and chunks of salt bacon, and dippers of spring water. The strangeness of blue mountains departed and they attended my walk that night with so warm a familiarity that I did not even think about them. It was dark, and as I reconnoitered the tracks and the store, there was not a man of that lanky band to be seen.

  The world had been blackened out by the heavy charcoal of night. There was no moon. But the sky was vaguely luminous, a dome of light in which the stars swung, and their keen votive smoke brought involuntary tears to the eyes and dimmed them, as wood smoke will. The white stars burned at a far, heatless distance. On that sky they might have been the white-hot and minute cinders of diamonds, which the wind had raked down, blown and scattered.

  The hills which had waited with heads raised, like lowing cattle, during the day, were now straightened and flattened into a one-dimensional rim circling the world, and bluntly standing out against the light of void thrown up from beyond it. The earth was like a black caldron swinging over the reflected glow of the night fires of space.

  I found a dimmed road and followed it to the liquid pulsations of the crickets. There were shrill encampments of these insects blotted in the fields and hills. Their notes were the sizzling of the caldron. Over the floor of silence ricocheted the sudden barking of dogs. A fan of yellow light opened across the fields, from the porch of a house, and in the porch two men were talking.

  I heard solitary words drop on to the air and eddying briefly down, extinguish into the dark. I passed closed doors, and windows in which oil lamps burned sparingly and laid a film of yellow light on the heads of talking people. A hand moving the light would start a whirligig of shadows over the walls, like the wings of big moths; and settling would cast and fix a new fantasy.

  I passed a shack on a hill, and out of its window was hopping the skirl of a gramophone. But the trees broke up and subdued the noise, and the black silence crept closely in as though it had been the breathing of the earth. I blotted myself into the woods, led on by a light which I discovered to be the lamp of a white frame church standing up naively like a child’s toy.

  In the church a wide voice was preaching, and words of the sermon jumped out of the open door into its funnel of light and fell out of the light to earth like the turning leaves. There was singing, a reverent monody. After, a deep silence, and I expected to see the lights put out. But a long silence of vacant dark. A chestnut aimed to earth.

  The lights clicked out. The preacher came out of the church and by the light of a storm lantern walked with a dozen men and women between the trees. The preacher, seeing the star smoke above, sang out courageously the tune of a hymn, till a woman’s voice stopped him with,

  “Right smart o’ chestnuts bin fallin’, Mr. Cooper. Last night one fell and hit Doc McDowell plum’ on the head.”

  The high nasal comment from Doc:

  “Yes. And I hain’t never seen no chestnut the size o’ that-a-one. Seemed like it kind o’ fell searchin’ for me.”

  Then the moon rose, yellow as candle light, and I could see the group by the boles of the columnar trees. The men were wearing black hats and blue overalls.

  AN ASIDE ON THE MOUNTAINEERS

  After hearing Doc McDowell’s widely drawling voice tell how the bursting chestnut hit him “plumb on the head,” I hurried home, feeling the ice of mountain strangeness had been cracked by this small wedge of overheard speech. But I awoke the next morning to see the immutable highlands waiting for me. They seemed to be mirrored in the air, like glass, to resist anything but a surface acquaintance.

  North Carolina is proud. Proud of having less than 1 percent of foreign blood in its stock. Proud of its pure Scottish, Irish and English blood. There you hear a strange dialect, not an acquired twang, but a traditional, custom-hewn brogue, something which hovers naïvely between a Devonshire accent and the Oxford manner.

  In these border mountains of western North Carolina, in the Unakas and Blue Ridge, it is said you may hear the English of Shakespeare and Chaucer; though in my wanderings to the remote parts of these mountains I did not experience the happiness of noting anything so rare, except the name Leander.

  Sitting in his storm-thinned and weather-split shack in one of the highest ranges, fifteen miles from a railway and eight miles from any road but a rough wagon trail, was Leander, tall, shaggy, unkempt as a furze bush; and his brother Beaumont. They could neither read nor write. Beaumont and Leander Wiggins, who gave us apples and asked, “Now is you-uns kin to ol’ Uncle Moses P——— on the yon side o’ Little Rock Creek?” That is as near to Shakespeare as we ever got!

  The mountaineers are perhaps America’s only peasantry. These men and women have been shut up in their loved mountains since the coming of the first settlers, and have conserved their rough, antique modes of living. The mountains still hold more of mysterious life than a stranger can quickly penetrate.

  The scattered huts shelter men almost startled by their own voices. Their speech has the intonation of solitude. Within the last two or three years roads have been carved into the mountains, and it is possible for the avid to “do” them at anything up to forty miles an hour. But the mountaineers accept the change suspiciously, keep to where one can travel only on horseback, and often only on foot.

  One sees the tall blue figures, with narrow heads looking to the ground, with hands in pockets, and gun laid across their arms, behind their backs—one sees them stalking along in depths of thought beyond the length of our conventional-sounding chains.

  Is it as grim as it appears to be? What does this brooding betoken? The thoughts of the mountaineer flow in deep, evasive channels. One is warned of the suspicious nature and lawless tendencies of these men. But I am safely back in New York to testify that a more hospitable and genial people does not exist, that they have what Pío Baroja—who would have been enthusiastic about them—would call a “dynamic” sense of freedom, the unconfiding, unadministered freedom of bears and squirrels, and that like the rest of us they do not want outsiders to meddle in their affairs.

  I became involved in no feuds. I discovered no stills—about which h
earsay has brought forth a vast brood of exaggerations, though there was vague evidence of both feuds and stills. But, even in these desperate matters, I prefer to remember these men are living according to the customs of 150 or 200 years ago. Better education and roads have only begun to penetrate their retreats. They have been a law unto themselves, have lived as clansmen and hunters, shot, hewn and eaten for their own bare needs in solitudes where even the echo of an ordered society has not been heard.

  Knowing only the stark changes of life, the unexplained varying of sun, wind, rain, the diurnal infusions of light and darkness, and the sporadic labor of the open air, the mountaineer obeys instinct without discriminating. Though unconsciously he carries within him, as he breaks into the laurel, that primal instinct of all, the instinct for law.

  The mountaineer fights hard for his liquor yet, and will do so until his adventurous impulses and his active mind are given occupations measuring up to his powers. Meanwhile, he is shrewd enough to let his children take advantage of the better opportunities for education which are now offering.

  I heard of one aged mountaineer, whose wild career had become a byword in the country, but who fell upon hard times and was forced to live in the corner of a sawmill shed throughout a severe winter. When strangers commiserated and asked how he spent the long, bare evenings, he said he taught his two grandchildren to read and write. “Thar never hain’t bin no ignorant Perkinses,” he said proudly.

  All this and “a right smart piece” more—as they say—I have discovered since that morning when, hesitating before the start, I saw the mountains indifferently, signlessly waiting like furred animals with the casual, upward forest marked on them. The moist, alluring blue had gone from them. They were gray-green, real, ponderous. They exhaled odors, the humid odors of sap and clay.

  The noon heat swayed over their hollows. Chords of wind moved in white vibration over their ridges. There were the short, warm smell of fields and the smell of damp earth under trees. There were the tang of thickets, the hanging odor of laurel or rhododendron, the flavor of stripped bark. The torches of corn rattled dryly like paper. The air weighed like the air of a warm barn, the rafterless barn of the sky to which the steep fields of corn and rye reached and attained.

  Blue rainclouds, sagging and weighty spheres of vapor, were forced over the ridges and, listing heavily, rolled over upon us with staring, electric clarity. Their enormous movements were defined powerfully in white curves and blue bodies of polished thunder. They bulked in silence.

  “Hit hain’t rained since the spring o’ the year. What way was it whaur ye came from?” commented and asked the first man we met on our way. Large and single circles of rain, slate blue, tapped the dust; and as we turned up our first creek, we heard ahead of us, lumbering wagons of thunder jolting stolidly down from the gaps.

  ON THE TRAIL OF ALISON

  Unknowingly we were on the trail of Alison, the grandiloquent Alison.

  Vagrant unshapely audiences of cloud moved before the sun, broke up, obscured and then released the main force of his light, giving the earth an inconstant, vaporous glaze. We walked through a valley for miles and miles, among sumac, goldenrod and Michaelmas daisies.

  Finding the mountains now built into ranges of loftiness, like green naves; the hills like chapels and chapters around them; and the ranges themselves supported by flying buttresses, ridges; and windows of light shining with the soft restraint of sun-wakened hills, the scene changed for us. We turned up one of the least habited creeks, as though it were the aisle of a cathedral. We climbed, as it were, turret, stairs, ridding ourselves of the weighty valley sun, and breathing a more agile air.

  A man getting corn out of his barn told us we could spend the night at his sister’s house. He had a grandiloquent figure, filling his overalls to an ample blue like a bombastic sky, wearing his black hat—through which his hair stuck like ears of wheat at the side of the crown—more as a tilted and permanent gesture of expatiation than as headgear.

  He was delighted with life. As we walked with him toward his sister’s solitary shack poked onto the brow of a hill, he pointed out to us high lifts of land and askew triangles of corn and rye and pasturage which he owned on the ridge.

  “Nat Pearcy is my name. Yessir. I didn’t catch yours. Oh, yes. Why, right smart of them folk living in Gap Creek over Cloudland. There’s Ned, and Doc, and Tom, and Commodore. Would you-uns be like kin to them? Well, no, I guess not, because you-uns comes over the waters. Whaur did you-uns come from? Are you married? So am I. Well, well! My wife went over to Linville to pick galax for a week. If she was here I’d have ye lodge with us. That’s my house. No, thata one, thar. Them’s my fields, way up to the yan side of thata wood and then yan ways down the creek. Hit’s a right pretty piece.

  “And how old did you-uns say you-uns is? Why, and jes kinda hikin’ round? That’s what ol’ man Alison did. He came over the waters too. He jes went sportin’ roun’ peddlin’. I hain’t seed the like o’ thata one. He was an Irishman. He jes went snoopin’ aroun’ like you-uns, peddlin’ things, toting ’em on his back, and gettin’ folk to take him in o’ nights. He sure was the workingest man I ever seed. He used to tell us about Canady and Jerusalem. Sight in the world o’ peddlers comes thisa way and they all says what Alison says: ‘Thar hain’t better water nor the mountain water in the world.’ Hit’s plumb pure.”

  On the air was the odor of fallen apples. On the highest ranges of the mountains drawn back in gray austerity white clouds were curtaining. A blue gauze of thundercloud shone in a low gap. The sky, burdened for hours, and tiring of its pulling sacks of vapor, seemed to pause, look around helplessly. Unable to hold out, it released those blue sacks and the white hail grain streamed and channeled down. And dull balls of thunder bumped over the gap and rolled cannoning down the creek.

  “That sure is a pretty sight,” shouted Mr. Pearcy as we ran. “Hit’s fallin’ right hard.”

  Mr. Pearcy’s sister, Mrs. Ayres, lived in a shack of two small rooms, each containing two wide beds. The walls and roof had slits of open air between the cracks in the beams and boards. There was no ceiling. The walls were partly papered by tailors’ catalogues and newspapers. There was a fireless iron stove in the middle of the room. Mrs. Ayres had a pale earthen countenance, and a chin which levered forth her words resonantly.

  But Mr. Pearcy’s gusty eloquence silenced all by its heartiness. He picked up a newspaper three months old and began reading about Mustafa Kemal. “That’s what ol’ man Alison used to say. He waur the travelingest man I know’d. Hit’s dangerous, he told me. If that thar Mustafa goes on a ’fiscatin’ o’ everything, that’ll get the Greco-Japanese alliance plumb tore up. Was you-uns ever in Jerusalem? No? Alison was. Thar hain’t nowhaur Alison hain’t bin.”

  Mrs. Ayres, allied with the smell of dinner, silenced her brother. As we took our places on the benches she shouted, “Now you-uns jes help yourselves, like hit was your own homes, and jes reach what you-uns wants. Here, Ned”—to her husband, sliding some chunks of salt-encrusted bacon to him off the dish. Then to us, explaining, “I help him first, like he was kind o’ handier.”

  Everyone ate with great gesticulation, Mrs. Ayres standing on the bridge, as it were, commanding as the conversation continued scrappily.

  “Have ye fed the hogs, Ned?”

  “Zeb Vance says he’s got pretty smart o’ honey, this month.”

  “Thar’s sights o’ wagons on the pike goin’ up and Tom McKinney’s got his mules.”

  “If only this rain had fallen in the summer. When I seed them clouds fallin’ over the gap, I thought, Hit sure is goin’ to rain at last. An’ hit come, plumb hard.”

  “Hit’s real mean haulin’ water from the spring, because our’n dried up.”

  After a pause, a thin piping voice from the end of the table: “Whaur does you-uns ’spectation to end, like whaur is you-all goin’?”

  I had scarcely noticed him before, Mrs. Ayres’s husband. He had sat against the wall
with his small flat head against a string of drying peppers. His skin was pink and fair, and was tightly stretched over his face making his eyes peer out in two small, hard balls, inquisitively, birdlike. As he sat there, his head barely above the table, he seemed ephemeral, like a slice of thundercloud with a pink sunset flush to it, which might melt into colored waters and disappear if the sun became too strong. He was but the cloud. His brother-in-law was the thunder.

  After dinner a neighboring mountaineer and his wife stopped and came in, slowly and gravely, smiling appropriately like a diplomatic corps. The conversation of the men drifted strangely to the subject of courthouses and trials, and Mr. Pearcy expatiated on the rights of juries, and by a suspicious association of ideas began to talk freely about “hit,” and how difficult it was to make “hit,” but how, in spite of the “revenue,” some assumed the risk.

  I was surprised at these confidences, but an apologetic, quizzical expression on the face of the grave neighbor led me to believe that Nat Pearcy, having found an audience, was remembering “with advantages.” Talk waned to the subject of postage stamps, and then Nat Pearcy picked up the newspaper again and brought us back to Mustafa Kemal. Mr. Ayres, cloud pale, said shyly:

  “Nat sure is the readingest man in the world.”

  But Nat demurred modestly:

  “The readingest man and the travelingest man I ever know’d waur Gashry Alison. I hain’t seed him for a right smart bit. Mebbe he has quit peddlin’ and built him a house somewhaur.”

  The strangers went. Mr. and Mrs. Ayres and their three children blew out the lamp and got into the two beds, with all their clothes on. We were given the other bed. Through the wide cracks and holes in the walls and roof we could see the wet, vague hills and hear the shrill scissoring of the crickets. Once in the night, rain drummed down and splashed at us. The wide air pushed in. All night the room was loud with the squeaking, creaking and scampering of little feet on the floors and beds, and with the tearing of paper and the overturning of tins, in minute pandemonium. Gashry Alison—what a name, I thought. And he had slept under that very roof.